MIDDLERIB’S DOG.

MR. MIDDLERIB used to be a devoted dog fancier. About three years ago he owned a beautiful hound pup about five months old. It was considered an ornament to the neighborhood. A hound pup at that age is an object of surprising beauty, under any circumstances; but when you consider that Mr. Middlerib had raised his pup on scientific principles (boiled beef and rice), you can readily imagine what a canine divinity it was. Gaunt legs, longer than your grandfather’s stories, and the hind ones so crooked that the dog sticks his foot into everything in the yard every time he tries to scratch his ear; sides look as though he had swallowed an old hoopskirt, and the springs showed through; more ribs under his hide than there are spots on it; tail as long as the dog, and two inches across the big end and tapering down like a marlinspike, so lean you can count every joint in it, and so hard that you couldn’t scratch it with a diamond—has every appearance of having been made ten years before the dog was, and then hung out to bleach in the rain and dry in the sun until the dog came along; ears soft as a kid glove, and about the size and appearance of a blacksmith’s apron—bear every evidence of being considered by all other dogs in the precinct as dreadful nice things to chew. Beautiful eyes; open twenty-three hours and fifty-nine minutes of the day; scare every woman into fits that looks into the back yard after dark. Sweet mouth, opens on a hinge at the back of his head, and is never shut unless there is something in it. That’s the best picture of a growing hound, one of this kind with liver colored spots, that we can draw, and Mr. Middlerib’s was just like that, only more so. His principal characteristic was a tendency to lunch. He was fond of nibbling little things around the house. Split his face one Sunday while the folks were at church, and shut it down over a whole ham. Liked to peek at odd bones and scraps, and one Monday morning he ate two tablecloths, a flannel shirt, a big roller towel, half a dozen clothes pins and thirteen linear yards of clothes-line, before the washing had been hung out half an hour. Fond of eggs, too, and knows every hen by sight in the neighborhood, and sets off on a friendly call every time he hears a cackle. Mrs. M. wants to sell him, but Middlerib says gold couldn’t buy him. So he stays, and eggs are as scarce in that ward as ever.

Well, one night, Mrs. M. had made something by pulverizing a lot of very hot potatoes. We believe it was yeast. Any how, it was necessary that it should cool very presently, and after some misgivings relative to the dog and his weakness, which were dispelled by Middlerib’s indignant defense of that sagacious animal, the dish containing the fiery compound was placed on the outer edge of a window sill, to cool in the night air.

Then the family resumed their occupation of hearing Middlerib explain the causes that led to the recent revolution in politics.

Such a weird, unearthly, piercing wail hadn’t been heard since Dresseldorf learned to play the clarionet. It seemed to come out of the ground, out of the sky, out of the air around them, and for an instant the frightened Middleribs gazed at each other with white, terror-blanched faces. Then they rushed to the door and looked out. A gaunt, ghostly form, with liver colored spots and a mouth full of red hot potato yeast thrashed wildly up and down the yard, splitting the darkness with terrific yells at every jump. It was Middlerib’s dog; and it was apparently feeling uneasy. It dashed madly around in short circles and screamed “Police,” and scraped its jaws with its paws, and wept and rubbed its chops along the cold ground, and swore and howled for water, and pawed the earth and sang psalms, and in several ways expressed its disapprobation of potato yeast as a diet. Finally, the dog wedged himself in between the fence and the ash-barrel, and told all about it, how it happened and what it felt like, and how he liked it as far as he’d got. He never slept a wink that night. He was too anxious to get his narrative completed and see the proofs of it. Neither did anybody in the neighborhood sleep, either. And every time a water pitcher would crash down into the yard, or a boot-jack bang against the fence or an andiron plunge madly into the ash-barrel, the dog would laugh in mocking tones, and go on with his testimony. About midnight a vigilance committee waited on Mr. Middlerib, but he wouldn’t come out, and they couldn’t stand the noise long enough to break in the door. The dog finished his statement about sunrise, when the committee rose. The family ate baker’s bread the next day, and Middlerib so far yielded to Mrs. M.’s entreaties as to say that if any man will make a fair offer, he might sell an undivided third of the dog.