Page:Saunders - Beautiful Joe, 1893.djvu/300

Rh Miss Fluff. One day they tried to make me sit in a chair, and I got cross and bit Mrs. Tibbett, and she beat me cruelly, and her servants stoned me away from the house."

"Speaking about fools, Dandy," I said, "if it is polite to call a lady one, I should say that that lady was one. Dogs shouldn't be put out of their place. Why didn't she have some poor children at her table, and in her carriage, and let the dogs run behind?"

"Easy to see you don't know New York," said Dandy, with a laugh. "Poor children don't live with rich, old ladies. Mrs. Tibbett hated children anyway. Then dogs like poodles would get lost in the mud, or killed in the crowd if they ran behind a carriage. Only knowing dogs like me can make their way about." I rather doubted this speech, but I said nothing, and he went on, patronizingly: "However, Joe, thou hast reason, as the French say. Mrs. Judge Tibbett didn't give her dogs exercise enough. Their claws were as long as Chinamen's nails, and the hair grew over their pads, and they had red eyes and were always sick, and she had to dose them with medicine, and call them her poor, little, 'weeny-teeny, sicky-wicky doggies.' Bah! I got disgusted with her. When I left her, I ran away to her niece's, Miss Balls. She was a sensible young lady, and she used to scold her aunt for the way in which she brought up her dogs. She was almost too sensible, for her pug and I were rubbed and scrubbed within an inch of our lives, and had to go for such long walks that I got thoroughly sick of them. A woman whom the servants called Trotsey, came every morning, and took the pug and me by our chains, and sometimes another dog or two, and took us for long tramps in quiet streets. That was Trotsey's business, to walk