38 O HENRY - 100 S E L E C T E D STORIES

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-China-
Stoke-Pogis fox terrier. The fat lady chased a V around among the
samples of gros grain flannelette in her shopping-bag till she cor­
nered 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. M y 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.
 O HENRY - 100 S E L E C T E D STORIES 39
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 air-
shaft - 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. W e
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 lob­
ster? 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 communica­
tion 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,