He did not see Harrington at first, but stepping around the corner of the house, he caught sight of him, and all his passionate agitation faded away in surprise as he became aware of his friend’s occupation. Harrington was stooping down in an angle of the garden near a large square box set on end, rubbing away with a gloved hand at the back of an old, weak, white dog, the same Wentworth had seen tormented in the street that morning. Actually, thought Wentworth, he went back to take that forsaken brute home with him!
“What in thunder are you doing, Harrington?” he exclaimed, approaching the scene of his friend’s operations.
Harrington started, and turned his glowing face with a half ashamed smile upon Wentworth, then continued to rub the dog’s back.
“I couldn’t leave the poor old fellow in such a plight, Richard,” he remarked, in an apologetic tone, “so, you see, I took him in.”
“Why, he’s got the mange,” said Wentworth, eying the animal with a face of mingled disgust and curiosity.
“That’s not his fault,” returned Harrington, coolly, dipping his gloved hand into a box of what appeared to be powdered sulphur, sprinkling a handful on the dog’s back, and rubbing it in.
The dog, meanwhile, lying on the ground, was devouring with feeble content a plateful of broken victuals which the young man had procured from the house. He was a miserable, weak, red-eyed, flaccid-jawed, dirty-white old mastiff, and, as the young artist had observed, he had the mange. As ugly, forlorn-looking and worthless a cur in his life as that dead dog which, the old Mohammedan apologue says, the Jewish mob derided in the streets of Jerusalem, when a tall stranger of grave and sweet aspect drew near, and paused to cast a look of compassion on the object of their derision. “Is it not a miracle of ugliness!” jeered the crowd. “But see,” said the stranger, “pearls are not equal to the whiteness of his teeth!” And then, says the Mohammedan story, the people knew that the stranger was the great prophet Jesus, for none but he would look upon a dead dog with the beauty-seeing eye of love.
“Poor old fellow,” soliloquized Harrington, “I quite forgot I had him, till he whined for his dinner.”
“How confoundedly dirty he is,” observed Wentworth.