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The stables was my jail, so the Master said, but I don’t ask no better home than that jail.

“Now, Kid,” says he, sitting on the top of a bucket upside down, “you’ve got to understand this. When I whistle it means you’re not to go out of this ‘ere yard. These stables is your jail. And if you leave ’em I’ll have to leave ’em, too, and over the seas, in the County Mayo, an old mother will ‘ave to leave her bit of a cottage. For two pounds I must be sending her every month, or she’ll have naught to eat, nor no thatch over ‘er head; so, I can’t lose my place, Kid, an’ see you don’t lose it for me. You must keep away from the kennels,” says he; “they’re not for the likes of you. The kennels are for the quality. I wouldn’t take a litter of them woolly dogs for one wag of your tail, Kid, but for all that they are your betters, same as the gentry up in the big house are my betters. I know my place and keep away from the gentry, and you keep away from the Champions.”

So I never goes out of the stables. All day I just lay in the sun on the stone flags, licking my jaws, and watching the grooms wash down the carriages, and the only care I had was to see they didn’t get gay and turn the hose on me. There wasn’t even a single rat to plague me. Such stables I never did see.

“Nolan,” says the head-groom, “some day that dog of yours will give you the slip. You can’t keep a street-dog tied up all his life. It’s against his natur’.” The head-groom is a nice old gentleman, but he doesn’t know everything. Just as though I’d been a street-dog because I liked it. As if I’d rather poke for my vittles in ash-heaps than have ’em handed me in a wash-basin, and would sooner bite and fight than be polite and sociable. If I’d had mother there I couldn’t have asked for nothing more. But I’d think of her snooping in the gutters, or freezing of nights under the bridges, or, what’s worse of all, running through the hot streets with her tongue down, so wild and crazy for a drink, that the people would shout “mad dog” at her, and stone her. Water’s so good, that I don’t blame the men-folks for locking it up inside their houses, but when the hot days come, I think they might remember that those are the dog-days and leave a little water outside in a trough, like they do for the horses. Then we wouldn’t go mad, and the policemen wouldn’t shoot us. I had so much of everything I wanted that it made me think a lot of the days when I hadn’t nothing, and if I could have given what I had to mother, as she used to share with me, I’d have been the happiest dog in the land. Not that I wasn’t happy then, and most grateful to the Master, too, and if I’d only minded him, the trouble wouldn’t have come again.

But one day the coachman says that the little lady they called Miss Dorothy had come back from school, and that same morning she runs over to the stables to pat her ponies, and she sees me.

“Oh, what a nice little, white little dog,” said she; “whose little dog are you?” says she.

“That’s my dog, miss,” says the Master. “‘Is name is Kid,” and I ran up to her most polite, and licks her fingers, for I never see so pretty and kind a lady.

“You must come with me and call on my new puppies,” says she, picking me up in her arms and starting off with me.

“Oh, but please, Miss,” cries Nolan, “Mr. Wyndham give orders that the Kid’s not to go to the kennels.”