Page:My last friend, dog Dick (IA mylastfrienddogd00deam).pdf/30

22 with the charming elegance of a tiny colt, or he sits before the fire, his hind legs close together, the white breast projecting and with head high, like a self-admiring, newly decorated cavalier posing before the camera.

It is one of the comical features of his manners, whether quiet or in motion that I can see in them a caricature of some human posing and moving. It reminds me of so many listeners in scientific conferences when they slumber, or when they take little naps, while pretending to listen. Dick bows and nods. Lowering his head slowly, and raising it up all at once and then letting it recline again, little by little, in just the same way that they used to do, those gentlemen in the conferences, so that they would not be observed giving that dangling leaden skull, the appearance of a continual approval of the eloquence that was putting them to sleep. When he walks tortuosly, with that twisting of his spine, he is so comic that I can never look at him without laughing, again. The old image comes up to me of some old soldiers feeble and exhausted belonging to the ancient national guard, walking in the same twisted manner when they marched on the