CRIB AND HIS COMPANIONS.

THE first dog! If he was ours in childhood, he remains for ever a dog by himself, a wiser, dearer, prettier, more important animal, than any of his successors. He might be a yellow, bristly, little mongrel, as, after the lapse of many years, and much reflection, I have come to think that mine was; but the child-love spent upon him so tenderly, exalted him in his life-time, and enshrined him in his death. Had he lived to be seen with grown-up eyes, I feel I should have called Crib a cur, for he could hardly, with the points about him which I remember best, have been so very beautiful. He was rather larger than a Skye terrier, wiry-haired, but curly. He had a round head, and a short nose, and drooping ears, and a short stiff tail. There was a tradition in the nursery that his grandfather had been a French poodle-and that legend inspired me with a notion of Crib as I should like to see him-clipped as like a lion as could well be managed, with a great ruff of hair before, and none behind, and his tail shaved small, and a tuft at the end of it.

His ancestors, the poodles, of whom we had three in china, with baskets in their mouths, on the nursery mantel-piece, looked just like that, and I felt that if Crib could ever have justice done him, he would be as smartlooking as the china dogs, and not at all unlike a lion. But who was to do it? because Crib would not hear of my sawing much at his hair with the blunt nursery scissors, and the nurses could not be persuaded to see the matter in a right light, and I had no one else to help me; so the end of it was, that after very hard work, and dangerous work too for little fingers, with those unmanageable scissors, Crib's back was clipped into a few great ridges, from the loss of several bunches of his yellow curls; but I had the grief of seeing that he never looked a bit more like a lion, and never would, if no one would help by being kind enough to be his barber; and no one ever did.

The most remarkable thing about Crib was his gravity. It impressed me almost to a painful degree. Like some older people, I imagined goodness and gravity were all the same thing, and as Crib was never naughty, and I knew I was always being told I was, his extreme goodness being quite unattainable became rather depressing. I never thought of it as probably being low spirits in Crib, which it really must have been, (for I remember that he never played about like other dogs,) or I should have pitied him, and tried to comfort him. But his gravity seemed far beyond all pity, and filled me with so much respect, that I felt much more as if I belonged to Crib, than I ever did that he belonged to me.

Faint misgivings as to this extraordinary wisdom and gravity sometimes, however, crossed my mind, and that was upon the occasions which we called Crib's Frog-fights.

Why Crib fought the frogs, and then killed and ate them, I cannot

imagine. The nurses said it was because he was a French dog, or at all events, that his grandfather having been French, he had been used to eat frogs, and his grandson had inherited the taste; and when we found that he only ate the legs, just as the nurses said 'them nasty French' did, we were quite sure we had got to the bottom of Crib's proceedings. I don't believe now, we had. The sight of a frog made him furious; his hair bristled, and his white teeth glistened as he growled, till he shook all over in his passion; he would stand stiffened, with his tail stuck on end, growling savagely at a frog, who would be sitting bolt upright, in the complacent way they always do between their hops when upon an expedition; but when once Crib had seen him, poor Froggie went no further; he was only growled at as long as he was quiet, but, at the first hop, Crib sprung upon him, and catching him in his mouth, dashed him away again, and then shivering with fury, would pick him up again and again every time he moved, till at last, the foam all dropping from his mouth like a mad dog, he would tear the frog limb from limb, and eat

him.

These proceedings of Crib's frightened me extremely, and put my faith in his gravity and goodness to a severe test, by what the nurses called these 'goings-on' of his. Why Crib should be angry with the frogs nobody could think; it was quite evident he ate them because he hated them, and not because he liked them. Many a battle have I watched, peeping from behind one of the pillars of a verandah, where he generally found his frogs, holding on to it in horror, afraid of Crib, and shocked at him, but yet obliged to look out now and then to see how the fight went on, and delighted to have him back again in his right mind as soon as his frog-fury was over.

When Crib came, he was a great half-grown puppy, but already immoveably grave; for three or four years, through long summer days spent out in the garden and woods, he was generally my companion; and for a whole year, Crib and I had it all our own way; as far, at least, as the caprices of the nurses would allow us. We could wander about for hours, so that we answered to the nursery roll-call for dinner and tea.

But these periodical returns to civilization were looked upon by me (though probably not by Crib) as the greatest possible annoyance. One dream of happiness always came back after every fit of childish misery, and that was to run away and live in a wood or cave, as a wild child. Over and over again, every detail of the flight, both for Crib and myself, was planned; for Crib was to come too; and I set about a systematic training for both him and myself, for the life we were to lead.

The first and most important step seemed to be, that we ought to learn to live upon what the servants called 'broken victuals.' Scraps of bread and butter, bits of sugar, cakes, and apples, and bits of bone for Crib, were carefully collected, and stowed away in the pocket of my frock (bones and all) at every opportunity. These were eaten when we got away together, quite by ourselves, as we did sometimes for half a

day.

Such happy days, when our training for turning wild was being carried on in earnest.

The bread and butter, and other nursery scraps, were to be superseded, of course, in time, by the berries and acorns, which I should get used to as I got wilder; and Crib was to catch rabbits.

Somewhere on the rocky sides of those blue hills, beyond the river, there would be a cave where we should live when we were wild; but, in the meantime, it was very difficult to find good hiding places to go on with our training properly. The prettiest, but not the safest place by any means, was a beloved Summer-castle in the wood. A little plot of smooth mossy turf, surrounded by a wall of golden gorse, and roofed in by the dark branches of a fir, in which a whole shower of goldfinches used often to be singing, their sweet warbling little notes filling the whole place with music; the gold drop on their wings glancing in the sun, as they flitted and twittered amongst the branches-those dark fir branches, through which the sky looked so beautifully blue, as they moved across it in the light wind and threw flickering shadows on the moss below. When the sun was very hot, there would be sharp little reports going on all over the tree, where the fir-cones were opening, and then the air would be filled with the aromatic, piny scent—a cedar scent, which always brings back that Summer-castle in the wood. Through the red trunks of the fir trees, across the dark brown bog, could be seen the distant sea, like a bar of silver in the sun; but I cared more then for the goldfinches, and the ring-doves cooing all over the wood, and the yellow and black-velvet humble bees droning over the gorse blossoms, than for the silver sea, or the blue hills beyond the river. Crib's chief attraction to the castle seemed to be a general flavour of rabbit which he always pretended to find there. Little he cared for the symmetry of the velvety, mossy, green carpet, as he scratched away with both forepaws, only pausing to take breath now and then, with his tongue hanging out of his mouth, and then, after a long satisfactory snuff into the hole he had excavated, to work again, harder than ever, throwing out the earth behind him, and tearing away at the bits of roots with his teeth. If you attempted to encourage Crib, by a word or a pat, when he was excavating, he always took it as an insult, bounced out of the hole he was making, and fiercely showed his teeth. Of course he spoilt the castle, and never caught the rabbit, but it kept him good;' and besides, if he chose to do it nobody could stop him, and it was all in the way of training.

But the castle, though so pleasant and pretty, was no longer tenable as a fortress; the nurses knew all about it, and had a way of coming down upon it, and taking it by storm, which quite put an end to all feeling of being a wild child who lived there. A flutter of cap-ribbons might at any moment appear above the gorsy walls, and, for a lost savage, it was very trying to be told, by Jane or Betsy, to come in that moment to the nursery dinner, and 'have your hair brushed, and that dirty pinny off, you naughty child.'

But, at last, Crib and I had possession of two impregnable fortresses, where we retreated in safety for a whole year and a half, whenever our larder was supposed to be in a satisfactory state for standing a siege, and it was thought we could hold out long enough. The first place was a hay-loft, belonging to an unused stable, some way from the house, where the stable cats always had their nurseries, being quiet and remote from civilization; and a pair of white owls nested under the roof, swallows built on the rafters, and bats flew in and out at night. It was a grand place when you were once in; but it took so much scrambling to get into, that it was not an available fortress for a hurried retreat. Climbing up into a manger, and helping Crib, and then getting him and myself through the broken bars of the hay-rack, which nearly squeezed us both flat, all took time; so castle number two was not often resorted to. Our grand fortress was always a castle in a stack, and we had a succession of these, all more or less eligible. The very best was a burrow in the top of a straw-stack. It was a perilous clamber to get into that castle, the only approach being a jump from a ledge in a neighbouring hay-stack, at a great height from the ground; but once there, nothing could be more delightful. The burrow was our own making; Crib scratched at it, but perhaps did not help as much as he thought he did, and I pulled out the straw; and when done, it was a long sloping tunnel, into which one could slide feet first, with a door-way, over which the golden straw stalks hung so naturally, that no nurse in the world would ever have seen it was a castle, and contained the naughty child she shouted for below. Crib knew perfectly well that he was to be neither seen or heard when en retraite, he lay still, his sharp hazel eyes peeping sideways down at the angry nurse, and not moving a muscle till she was safe away. Then Crib would get up and shake himself, and try to get a little exhilaration by mouse hunting in the castle; or he sat and watched the process of weaving rush baskets, or the stringing of the lovely great white and yellow daisies, into chains and bracelets, for the nursery children' up at the house. An old copy of Paradise Lost was always carried up to that castle, and Crib had to listen to some very queer versions of Satanic and Angelic speeches read out to him. Sometimes he went to sleep, and so did his mistress, who only woke up to find the shadows long, and the evening drawing in, and much pleased at having been a savage so long, had to prepare for the scolding and sending to bed, which always awaited the return to the nursery.

One of the greatest delights was to get up, and out, and away with Crib in the dawn of a summer morning. A feat we very seldom accomplished, (perhaps two or three times,) but the wonderful beauty of that morning world, as seen for the first time by a child's eyes, remains a vivid memory still.

One well-remembered morning, a great star was looking in at the window, paled and fading in the sky, when I opened it and leant out to listen to the birds, and determined to get Crib, if he would come, and go

out. Dressed at last, and past the nursery door, and down those strangely silent stairs, and Crib called from his guard at the foot of them, what a wild delight to open a glass door, and find the great crystal-clear globe of blue air above, and running out upon the dewy grass to look back at the house, looking so strange in the level sun-light, with its white blinds all down, like a many-eyed giant with his eyes shut up and fast asleep; but we never stirred beyond the sight of those shut-up eye-windows, for I dared not. I could not have gone to my castles for anything, not feeling at all sure whether there might not be live giants, or something else as queer in them at that hour. Everything looked mysterious in the morning light, the sun, large and near, just above the rocky outline of the eastern hills, and the shadows long and level below the trees. The birds, so tame in the stillness, the flashing of the jewel-like dew-drops from every leaf and blade of grass, so strangely beautiful and brilliant; and then the delight of the acres of golden dandelions and silvery daisies, all over the lawn, as far as eye could see; all gold, and green, and white. Flowers of all kinds, but those lawn dandelions and daisies especially, were all the world to me, loved with a strange keen child-love, which somehow made of them sentient things to be pitied for being trodden on, and never to be picked and thrown away to die. The hills, far and near, were in that morning light more beautiful than a dream; but I cared for them, I think, about as much as Crib did, whose way of amusing himself was generally by making his toilet by a remorseless roll amongst the dandelions. Crib was asleep on his mat again, and his mistress in bed, before the servants were stirring.

Going up-stairs there was a door to be passed, which nothing in the world would have induced me to pass at night alone, and even in daylight I never looked at it and went by with a run. Out of that door we believed came at times a frightful pair of hob-goblins, about whom the nursery was for years in a state of chronic depression. The goblins were invoked by the nurses whenever we made too much noise, or would go out of the nursery. They must have been, what I never heard of before in any Folk Lore, a married pair of hob-goblins. The nurses called them Mr. and Mrs. Bogy; but Mrs. Bogy was known familiarly, in a kind of grim fun, by the name of Mrs. Scratchy, because she kept her nails sharp and long to scratch naughty children with. Our goblins were not supposed to be dangerous by daylight; but still they were an awful pair-ghosts, giants, and goblins, all in one. Bogy himself, however, was not altogether malevolent; at all events, he was capable of being propitiated, and when we had been very good, it was rather a comforting promise to hear, Then I'll go and tell Bogy what a good child you are to-day.' But Mrs. Scratchy was an untold terror; so extreme was my dread of her, that I never opened my eyes after once getting into bed, lest her head and curl-papers should appear within the curtains; for we had once seen her-and just where the nurses described