Page:Wilson - The Boss of Little Arcady (1905).djvu/169

 perhaps a field-trial winner. He would learn to take reproof amiably, to "heel" at a word, to respect the whistle at any distance, to be steady to shot and wing, to retrieve promptly from land or water, and never to bolt or range beyond control or be guilty of false pointing.

I knew that coercion, steadily and tactfully applied, would thus educate him, for was he not of champion ancestry, wearing his pedigree in his looks, with the narrow shoulders so desirable and so rarely found, with just the right number of hairs at the end of his tail, the forelegs properly feathered, the feet and ankles strong, the right amount of leather in his ear to the fraction of an inch,—a dog, in short, of beauty, style, speed, nose, and brains?

But in this full moment of a glad morning I resolved that Jim should never know the Renaissance; he should never emerge from what Mrs. Potts had gracefully described as "the golden age of Pericles."

To the end of his days he should be blithely, naïvely Greek; a dog of wretched field manners, pointing cattle and quail impartially, shamefully gun-shy, inconsequent, volatile, ignorant, forever paganly joyous without due cause. For him I should do what no one had been able to do for me—detain him in that "world of fine fabling" where everything is true that ought to be; where the earth is a running course, fascinating in its surprises of open road and tangled hedgerow; where mere indiscriminate smelling is keenest ecstasy; and where the fact that robins