of the Newfoundland breed, for whose honesty I would be bail to any amount; but whose intellectual qualities in association with dramatic fiction I cannot rate high.  Indeed, he is too honest for the profession he has entered.  Being at a town in Yorkshire last summer, and seeing him posted in the bill of the night, I attended the performance.  His first scene was eminently successful; but, as it occupied a second in its representation (and five lines in the bill), it scarcely afforded ground for a cool and deliberate judgment of his powers.  He had merely to bark, run on, and jump through an inn window, after a comic fugitive.  The next scene of importance to the fable was a little marred in its interest by his over-anxiety; forasmuch as while his master (a belated soldier in a den of robbers on a tempestuous night) was feelingly lamenting the absence of his faithful dog, and laying great stress on the fact that he was thirty leagues away, the faithful dog was barking furiously in the prompter’s box, and clearly choking himself against his collar.  But it was in his greatest scene of all that his honesty got the better of him.  He had to enter a dense and trackless forest, on the trail of the murderer, and there to fly at the murderer when he found him resting at the foot of a tree, with his victim bound ready for slaughter.  It was a hot night, and he came into the forest from an altogether unexpected direction, in the sweetest temper, at a very deliberate trot, not in the least excited; trotted to the foot-lights with his tongue out; and there sat down, panting, and amiably surveying the audience, with his tail beating the boards, like a Dutch clock.  Meanwhile the murderer, impatient to receive his doom, was audibly calling to him “Co-o-ome here!” while the victim, struggling with his bonds, assailed him with the most injurious expressions.  It happened, through these means, that when he was in course of time persuaded to trot up and rend the murderer limb from limb, he made it (for dramatic purposes) a little too obvious that he worked out that awful retribution by licking butter off his blood-stained hands.

In a shy street behind Long Acre, two honest dogs live who perform in Punch’s shows.  I may venture to say that I am on terms of intimacy with both, and that I never saw either guilty of the falsehood of failing to look down at the man inside the show, during the whole performance.  The difficulty other dogs have in satisfying their minds about these dogs appears to be never overcome by time.  The same dogs must encounter them over and over again, as they trudge along in their off-minutes behind the legs of the show and beside the drum; but all dogs seem to suspect their frills and jackets, and to sniff at them as if they thought those articles of personal adornment an eruption—­a something in the nature of mange, perhaps.  From this Covent-garden window of mine I noticed a country dog only the other day, who had come up to Covent Garden Market under