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Dickens, Charles – The Uncommercial Traveller
been brought up at Oxford, too. The dog kept the gentleman
entirely for his glorification, and the gentleman never talked
about anything but the terrier. This, however, was not in a shy
neighbourhood, and is a digression consequently.
There are a great many dogs in shy neighbourhoods, who keep boys.
I have my eye on a mongrel in Somerstown who keeps three boys. He
feigns that he can bring down sparrows, and unburrow rats (he can
do neither), and he takes the boys out on sporting pretences into
all sorts of suburban fields. He has likewise made them believe
that he possesses some mysterious knowledge of the art of fishing,
and they consider themselves incompletely equipped for the
Hampstead ponds, with a pickle-jar and wide-mouthed bottle, unless
he is with them and barking tremendously. There is a dog residing
in the Borough of Southwark who keeps a blind man. He may be seen,
most days, in Oxford-street, haling the blind man away on
expeditions wholly uncontemplated by, and unintelligible to, the
man: wholly of the dog’s conception and execution. Contrariwise,
when the man has projects, the dog will sit down in a crowded
thoroughfare and meditate. I saw him yesterday, wearing the moneytray
like an easy collar, instead of offering it to the public,
taking the man against his will, on the invitation of a
disreputable cur, apparently to visit a dog at Harrow – he was so
intent on that direction. The north wall of Burlington House
Gardens, between the Arcade and the Albany, offers a shy spot for
appointments among blind men at about two or three o’clock in the
afternoon. They sit (very uncomfortably) on a sloping stone there,
and compare notes. Their dogs may always be observed at the same
time, openly disparaging the men they keep, to one another, and
settling where they shall respectively take their men when they
begin to move again. At a small butcher’s, in a shy neighbourhood
(there is no reason for suppressing the name; it is by Nottinghill,
and gives upon the district called the Potteries), I know a
shaggy black and white dog who keeps a drover. He is a dog of an
easy disposition, and too frequently allows this drover to get
drunk. On these occasions, it is the dog’s custom to sit outside
the public-house, keeping his eye on a few sheep, and thinking. I
have seen him with six sheep, plainly casting up in his mind how
many he began with when he left the market, and at what places he
has left the rest. I have seen him perplexed by not being able to
account to himself for certain particular sheep. A light has
gradually broken on him, he has remembered at what butcher’s he
left them, and in a burst of grave satisfaction has caught a fly
off his nose, and shown himself much relieved. If I could at any
time have doubted the fact that it was he who kept the drover, and
not the drover who kept him, it would have been abundantly proved
by his way of taking undivided charge of the six sheep, when the
drover came out besmeared with red ochre and beer, and gave him
wrong directions, which he calmly disregarded. He has taken the
sheep entirely into his own hands, has merely remarked with
respectful firmness, ‘That instruction would place them under an
omnibus; you had better confine your attention to yourself – you
will want it all;’ and has driven his charge away, with an
intelligence of ears and tail, and a knowledge of business, that
has left his lout of a man very, very far behind.
As the dogs of shy neighbourhoods usually betray a slinking
consciousness of being in poor circumstances – for the most part
manifested in an aspect of anxiety, an awkwardness in their play,
and a misgiving that somebody is going to harness them to
something, to pick up a living – so the cats of shy neighbourhoods
exhibit a strong tendency to relapse into barbarism. Not only are
they made selfishly ferocious by ruminating on the surplus
population around them, and on the densely crowded state of all the