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Sitting with your feet drawn up in front of you, on a small and rickety one-legged table, is a most trying exercise, especially if you are not used to it. George and I both felt our position keenly. We did not like to call out for help, and bring the family down. We were proud young men, and we feared lest, to the unsympathetic eye of the comparative stranger, the spectacle we should present might not prove imposing.

We sat on in silence for about half an hour, the dog keeping a reproachful eye upon us from the nearest chair, and displaying elephantine delight whenever we made any movement suggestive of climbing down.

At the end of the half hour we discussed the advisability of “chancing it,” but decided not to. “We should never,” George said, “confound foolhardiness with courage.”

“Courage,” he continued–George had quite a gift for maxims–“courage is the wisdom of manhood; foolhardiness, the folly of youth.”

He said that to get down from the table while that dog remained in the room, would clearly prove us to be possessed of the latter quality; so we restrained ourselves, and sat on.

We sat on for over an hour, by which time, having both grown careless of life and indifferent to the voice of Wisdom, we did “chance it;” and throwing the table-cloth over our would-be murderer, charged for the door and got out.

The next morning we complained to our landlady of her carelessness in leaving wild beasts about the place, and we gave her a brief if not exactly truthful, history of the business.

Instead of the tender womanly sympathy we had expected, the old lady sat down in the easy chair and burst out laughing.

“What! old Boozer,” she exclaimed, “you was afraid of old Boozer! Why, bless you, he wouldn’t hurt a worm! He ain’t got a tooth in his head, he ain’t; we has to feed him with a spoon; and I’m sure the way the cat chivies him about must be enough to make his life a burden to him. I expect he wanted you to nurse him; he’s used to being nursed.”

And that was the brute that had kept us sitting on a table, with our boots off, for over an hour on a chilly night!

Another bull-dog exhibition that occurs to me was one given by my uncle. He had had a bulldog–a young one–given to him by a friend. It was a grand dog, so his friend had told him; all it wanted was training–it had not been properly trained. My uncle did not profess to know much about the training of bull-dogs; but it seemed a simple enough matter, so he thanked the man, and took his prize home at the end of a rope.

“Have we got to live in the house with this?” asked my aunt, indignantly, coming in to the room about an hour after the dog’s advent, followed by the quadruped himself, wearing an idiotically self-satisfied air.

“That!” exclaimed my uncle, in astonishment; “why, it’s a splendid dog. His father was honorably mentioned only last year at the Aquarium.”

“Ah, well, all I can say is, that his son isn’t going the way to get honorably mentioned in this neighborhood,” replied my aunt, with bitterness; “he’s just finished killing poor Mrs. McSlanger’s cat, if you want to know what he has been doing. And a pretty row there’ll be about it, too!”

“Can’t we hush it up?” said my uncle.

“Hush it up?” retorted my aunt. “If you’d heard the row, you wouldn’t sit there and talk like a fool. And if you’ll take my advice,” added my aunt, “you’ll set to work on this ‘training,’ or whatever it is, that has got to be done to the dog, before any human life is lost.”

My uncle was too busy to devote any time to the dog for the next day or so, and all that could be done was to keep the animal carefully confined to the house.