The call of the wild-Spring running--whatever it is--that besets men and
dogs, seldom attained full mastery over him; but one could often see it
struggling against his devotion to the scent of us, and, watching that
dumb contest, I have time and again wondered how far this civilisation of
ours was justifiably imposed on him; how far the love for us that we had
so carefully implanted could ever replace in him the satisfaction of his
primitive wild yearnings: He was like a man, naturally polygamous,
married to one loved woman.
It was surely not for nothing that Rover is dog's most common name, and
would be ours, but for our too tenacious fear of losing something, to
admit, even to ourselves, that we are hankering. There was a man who
said: Strange that two such queerly opposite qualities as courage and
hypocrisy are the leading characteristics of the Anglo-Saxon! But is not
hypocrisy just a product of tenacity, which is again the lower part of
courage? Is not hypocrisy but an active sense of property in one's good
name, the clutching close of respectability at any price, the feeling
that one must not part, even at the cost of truth, with what he has
sweated so to gain? And so we Anglo-Saxons will not answer to the name
of Rover, and treat our dogs so that they, too, hardly know their
natures.
The history of his one wandering, for which no respectable reason can be
assigned, will never, of course, be known.
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