I treasured up this volume for years and years. I loved it all the better for the grief I had suffered when I supposed I had lost it by my poor reading, and though I have had hosts of handsomer and more costly books since, I have never had one I prized half so highly as My Aunt's Present.
A great many anecdotes have been told of dogs, from Ulysses' faithful brute, who, although his master was away twenty years, fighting the Trojans and wandering about the world, did not forget him, but kept one glad wag of affection in his old tail for his return, then dropped dead--down to the "Neptunes" and "Neros," the "Lions" and "Carlos" of which everybody knows;--but we once heard one which we think very few, if any of you, can have heard.
A friend of ours had three dogs,--two tolerably big ones and one little one. The big dogs he had had several years, but the little one, a Scotch terrier, had been bought only a few months before the time I am telling of.
About half a mile from our friend's house there was a mill, and the miller kept a large mastiff dog, who had always been very quiet and peaceable, until just about the time this little terrier came into the neighborhood, when there began a succession of battles between the mastiff and our friend's two big dogs. These battles became so frequent and so fierce, that they attracted the serious attention of both the miller and our friend.
What could it be that had made of these dogs such sudden and bitter enemies? Nobody could tell. But the poor creatures were never without a lame leg, a torn ear, or hurt eye; for as soon as the wounds of one battle got well, and often before, there would be another, even more bloody than the last, until our friend made up his mind that he must either shoot his dogs, or give them away to somebody that lived farther from the mill.
One bright morning, while things were in this condition, the miller was leaning out over the half-door of the second story of the mill, when he noticed our friend's little terrier trotting down the road, with his ears and tail set up very gaily. He thought it queer that the little fellow should be so far away from home alone--so, without exactly knowing that he did so, he watched him. He came running along, first on three legs, then on four--in that funny way that little dogs do, sometimes, you know--right down to where the miller's dog was lying stretched at full length in the sun.