a sugar-barrel, I ain’t so sure that I don’t agree with ’im. It’s big, you know—plenty of room to move, w’ich it ain’t so with a flour-barrel. An’ then the smell! Oh! you’ve no notion! W’y, that’s wuth the price of a night’s lodgin’ itself, to say nothin’ o’ the chance of a knot-hole or a crack full o’ sugar, that the former tenants has failed to diskiver.”
While the waif was commenting thus enthusiastically on the bliss of lodging in a sugar-barrel, we were surprised to see Dumps, who chanced to be trotting on in front come to a sudden pause and gaze at a lady who was in the act of ringing the door-bell of an adjoining house.
The door was opened by a footman, and the lady was in the act of entering when Dumps gave vent to a series of sounds, made up of a whine, a bark, and a yelp. At the same moment his tail all but twirled him off his legs as he rushed wildly up the stairs and began to dance round the lady in mad excitement.
The lady backed against the door in alarm. The footman, anxious apparently about his calves, seized an umbrella and made a wild assault on the dog, and I was confusedly conscious of Slidder exclaiming, “Why, if that ain’t my young lady!” as I sprang up the steps to the rescue.
“Down, Dumps, you rascal; down!” I exclaimed, seizing him by the brass collar with which I had invested him.—“Pardon the rudeness of my dog, madam,” I said, looking up; “I never saw him act in this way before. It is quite unaccountable—”
“Not quite so unaccountable as you think,” interrupted Slidder, who stood looking calmly on, with his hands in his pockets and a grin on his face.—“It’s your own dog, miss.”
“What do you mean, boy?” said the lady, a gaze of surprise chasing away the look of alarm which had covered her pretty face.
“I mean ’xactly what I says, miss. The dog’s your own: I sold it to you long ago for five bob!”
The girl—for she was little more than sixteen—turned with a startled, doubting look to the dog.
“If you don’t b’lieve it, miss, look at the vite spot on the bridge of ’is nose,” said Slidder, with a self-satisfied nod to the lady and a supremely insolent wink to the footman.
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