O Henry

                         Memoirs of a Yellow Dog

   I don't suppose it will knock any of you people off your perch 
to read a contribution from an animal. Mr. Kipling and a good 
many others have demonstrated the fact that animals can express 
themselves in remunerative English, and no magazine goes to press 
nowadays without an animal story in it, except the old-style 
monthlies that are still running pictures of Bryan and the Mont 
Pelee horror.
   But you needn't look for any stuck-up literature in my piece, 
such as Bearoo, the bear, and Snakoo, the snake, and Tammanoo, 
the tiger, talk in the jungle books. A yellow dog that's spent 
most of his life in a cheap New York flat, sleeping in a corner 
on an old sateen underskirt (the one she spilled port wine on at 
the Lady Longshoremen's banquet), mustn't be expected to perform 
any tricks with the art of speech.
   I was born a yellow pup; date, locality, pedigree and weight 
unknown. The first thing I can recollect, an old woman had me in 
a basket at Broadway and Twenty-third trying to sell me to a fat 
lady. Old Mother Hubbard was boosting me to beat the band as a 
genuine Pomeranian-Hambletonian-Red-Irish-Cochin-ChinaStoke-Pogis 
fox terrier. The fat lady chased a V around among the samples of 
gros grain flannelette in her shopping-bag till she cornered it, 
and gave up. From that moment I was a pet - a mamma's own wootsey 
squidlums. Say, gentle reader, did you ever have a 200-pound 
woman breathing a flavour of Camembert cheese and Peau d'Espagne 
pick you up and wallop her nose all over you, remarking all the 
time in an Emma Eames tone of voice: `Oh, oo's um oodlum, 
doodlum, woodlum, toodlum, bitsy-witsy skoodlums?'
   From a pedigreed yellow pup I grew up to be an anonymous 
yellow cur looking like a cross between an Angora cat and a box 
of lemons. But my mistress never tumbled. She thought that the 
two primeval pups that Noah chased into the ark were but a 
collateral branch of my ancestors. It took two policemen to keep 
her from entering me at the Madison Square Garden for the 
Siberian bloodhound prize.
   I'll tell you about that flat. The house was the ordinary 
thing in New York, paved with Parian marble in the entrance hall 
and cobblestones above the first floor. Our flat was three fl - 
well, not flights - climbs up. My mistress rented it unfurnished, 
and put in the regular things - 1903 antique upholstered parlour 
set, oil chromo of geishas in a Harlem tea-house, rubber plant 
and husband.
   By Sirius! there was a biped I felt sorry for. He was a little 
man with sandy hair and whiskers a good deal like mine. Hen-
pecked? - well, toucans and flamingoes and pelicans all had their 
bills in him. He wiped the dishes and listened to my mistress 
tell about the cheap, ragged things the lady with the squirrel-
skin coat on the second floor hung out on her line to dry. And 
every evening while she was getting supper she made him take me 
out on the end of a string for a walk.
   If men knew how women pass the time when they are alone they'd 
never marry. Laura Lean Jibbey, peanut brittle, a little almond 
cream on the neck muscles, dishes unwashed, half an hour's talk 
with the iceman, reading a package of old letters, a couple of 
pickles and two bottles of malt extract, one hour peeking through 
a hole in the window shade into the flat across the airshaft - 
that's about all there is to it. Twenty minutes before time for 
him to come home from work she straightens up the house, fixes 
her rat so it won't show, and gets out a lot of sewing for a ten-
minute bluff.
   I led a dog's life in that flat. 'Most all day I lay there in 
my corner watching the fat woman kill time. I slept sometimes and 
had pipe dreams about being out chasing cats into basements and 
growling at old ladies with black mittens, as a dog was intended 
to do. Then she would pounce upon me with a lot of that 
drivelling poodle palaver and kiss me on the nose - but what 
could I do? A dog can't chew cloves.
   I began to feel sorry for Hubby, dog my cats if I didn't. We 
looked so much alike that people noticed it when we went out; so 
we shook the streets that Morgan's cab drives down, and took to 
climbing the piles of last December's snow on the streets where 
cheap people live.
   One evening when we were thus promenading, and I was trying to 
look like a prize St. Bernard, and the old man was trying to look 
like he wouldn't have murdered the first organ-grinder he heard 
play Mendelssohn's wedding-march, I looked up at him and said in 
my way:
   `What are you looking so sour about, you oakum trimmed 
lobster? She don't kiss you. You don't have to sit on her lap and 
listen to talk that would make the book of a musical comedy sound 
like the maxims of Epictetus. You ought to be thankful you're not 
a dog. Brace up, Benedick, and bid the blues begone.'
   The matrimonial mishap looked down at me with almost canine 
intelligence in his face.
   `Why, doggie,' says he, `good doggie. You almost look like you 
could speak. What is it, doggie - Cats?'
   Cats! Could speak!
   But, of course, he couldn't understand. Humans were denied the 
speech of animals. The only common ground of communication upon 
which dogs and men can get together is in fiction.
   In the flat across the hall from us lived a lady with a black-
and-tan terrier. Her husband strung it and took it out every 
evening, but he always came home cheerful and whistling. One day 
I touched noses with the black-and-tan in the hall, and I struck 
him for an elucidation.
   `See, here, Wiggle-and-Skip,' I says, `you know that it ain't 
the nature of a real man to play dry-nurse to a dog in public. I 
never saw one leashed to a bow-wow yet that didn't look like he'd 
like to lick every other man that looked at him. But your boss 
comes in every day as perky and set up as an amateur 
prestidigitator doing the egg trick. How does he do it? Don't 
tell me he likes it.'
   `Him?' says the black-and-tan. `Why, he uses Nature's Own 
Remedy. He gets spifflicated. At first when we go out he's as shy 
as the man on the steamer who would rather play pedro when they 
make 'em all jackpots. By the time we've been in eight saloons he 
don't care whether the thing on the end of his line is a dog or a 
catfish. I've lost two inches of my tail trying to sidestep those 
swinging doors.'
   The pointer I got from that terrier - vaudeville please copy - 
set me to thinking.
   One evening about six o'clock my mistress ordered him to get 
busy and do the ozone act for Lovey. I have concealed it until 
now, but that is what she called me. The black-and-tan was called 
`Tweetness.' I consider that I have the bulge on him as far as 
you could chase a rabbit. Still `Lovey' is something of a 
nomenclatural tin-can on the tail of one's self respect.
   At a quiet place on a safe street I tightened the line of my 
custodian in front of an attractive, refined saloon. I made a 
dead-ahead scramble for the doors, whining like a dog in the 
press despatches that lets the family know that little Alice is 
bogged while gathering lilies in the brook.
   `Why, darn my eyes,' says the old man, with a grin; `darn my 
eyes if the saffron-coloured son of a seltzer lemonade ain't 
asking me in to take a drink. Lemme see - how long's it been 
since I saved shoe leather by keeping one foot on the footrest? I 
believe I'll -'
   I knew I had him. Hot Scotches he took, sitting at a table. 
For an hour he kept the Campbells coming. I sat by his side 
rapping for the waiter with my tail, and eating free lunch such 
as mamma in her flat never equalled with her homemade truck 
bought at a delicatessen store eight minutes before papa comes 
home.
   When the products of Scotland were all exhausted except the 
rye bread the old man unwound me from the table leg and played me 
outside like a fisherman plays a salmon. Out there he took off my 
collar and threw it into the street.
   `Poor doggie,' says he; `good doggie. She shan't kiss you any 
more. 'S a darned shame. Good doggie, go away and get run over by 
a street car and be happy.'
   I refused to leave. I leaped and frisked around the old man's 
legs happy as a pug on a rug.
   `You old, flea-headed woodchuck-chaser,' I said to him - `you 
moon-baying, rabbit-pointing, egg-stealing old beagle, can't you 
see that I don't want to leave you? Can't you see that we're both 
Pups in the Wood and the missis is the cruel uncle after you with 
the dish towel and me with the flea liniment and a pink bow to 
tie on my tail. Why not cut that all out and be pards for 
evermore?'
   Maybe you'll say he didn't understand - maybe he didn't. But 
he kind of got a grip on the Hot Scotches, and stood still for a 
minute, thinking.
`Doggie,' says he finally, `we don't live more than a dozen lives 
on this earth, and very few of us live to be more than 300. If I 
ever see that flat any more I'm a flat, and if you do you're 
flatter; and that's no flattery. I'm offering 60 to 1 that 
Westward Ho wins out by the length of a dachshund.'
   There was no string, but I frolicked along with my master to 
the Twenty-third Street ferry. And the cats on the route saw 
reason to give thanks that prehensile claws had been given them.
   On the Jersey side my master said to a stranger who stood 
eating a currant bun:
   `Me and my doggie, we are bound for the Rocky Mountains.' 
   But what pleased me most was when my old man pulled both of my 
ears until I howled, and said:
   `You common, monkey-headed, rat-tailed, sulphur-coloured son 
of a door-mat, do you know what I'm going to call you?'
   I thought of `Lovey,' and I whined dolefully.
   `I'm going to call you "Pete," ' says my master; and if I'd 
had five tails I couldn't have done enough wagging to do justice 
to the occasion.