Page:The Strand Magazine (Volume 3).djvu/364

 them, but they don't see you—they are watching for the next customer in at the door. You rap at the window or call; not one takes the trouble even to turn his head. You are not a customer, and it is only with customers that they have business. Personally I don't believe that all this is due to an interest in the visitors; I know the raffish, rat-catching ways of these fox-terriers, and am confident that they have bets among themselves—something in the nature of a sweepstake—as to who will be taken away next. Or perhaps each of these anxious little dogs is straining his eyes, and his chain, and his neck after that master who has been absent for many, many days, and who must come back to him soon—who can't have deserted him.

Certain men are seen hereabout whom nobody would expect to see anywhere else, and about whom I have a theory. These men are the exceptions that prove the Darwinian doctrine of the evolution of the human species through the monkey. In their descent from the primordial protoplasm they must have boldly skipped all the species between dog and man, so that now they carry as much external affinity to their last quadruped ancestors as other people do to the monkeys. Indeed, when you come to know them, you find them to be men of such enterprise and resource that this skipping business is just what they would have done with half a chance. Some keep shops, some help the shopkeepers, and some are free-lances. There is not a dog in the whole world that they will not undertake to get for you, at the right price, at a day's notice; if you were to demand the Dog of Montargis they would undertake to fetch it, even though they were driven to lie about its identity when produced. There is no end to their enterprise, and scarcely any to their number of big pockets. Out of these pockets stick puppies' heads, until the whole creature assumes the appearance of a sort of canine kangaroo broken out in a general eruption of pouches, with young ones in each. They are very good fellows, some of these, as a man with