Читать книгу Dogtown. Being Some Chapters from the Annals of the Waddles Family Set Down in the Language of Housepeople онлайн

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A friend he was, and she was entirely right—there was no other quite like him among sturdy, self-reliant, gentlemen dogs. He had been so long the companion of the House People that, without being of the objectionable, pampered, perfumed, spoon-fed type of lap dog who demands the care that a child alone should have, he really seemed to be, as Anne said, a person.

Waddles did not know a single taught trick; he could not hold sugar on his nose, like Miss Letty’s poodle, Hamlet; he could not sit up and beg, though he had a language of his own, part gesture, part speech, by which he could ask for anything that he could not get without aid.

In his frisky youth even he scorned the mere idea of jumping through a hoop, or the poodle trick of “saying his prayers.”

Yet there were few walls that he could not manage to get over or through, and he would put his paws upon his mistress’s knees and gaze into her face in unmistakable supplication.

“It’s a great responsibility having a dog like Waddles,” Anne had said one day, shortly after her brother was born, when she had given him half of her name, and stopped being Tommy-Anne, and there had been much talk about her new responsibility. “Do you know, mother, I believe Waddles thinks that I’m God, and it will be dreadful if I’m unkind and disappoint him.”