Mrs. Miles had a struggle whether she ought to keep a dog with such a disgraceful propensity, and one day she was very nearly giving him up, when by his gross self-indulgence he covered not only her but his master with ridicule and shame.
It was on a Sunday at noon, of all times, but Mrs. Miles had not been to church—she had sat up, the night before, with a sick neighbour. She had carried the younger child with her on her errand of mercy, while Mr. Miles had taken care of the elder, and been at church with him, leaving Prince to keep house, which he did with sufficient uprightness, in the family’s absence.
Mr. Miles had gone home when the service was over, and liberated the dog, permitting him to join the little party, in their Sunday clothes, that set out to meet and greet the wife and mother on her expected return.
Mrs. Miles had appeared duly, and been gratified by her husband’s attention. The group were proceeding in the most exemplary and agreeable fashion along the village street, when the heads of the household were startled by the nudges and sniggles, rising into roars of laughter, which their progress drew forth—not only from the loiterers about the ale-house door, but from the more decorous passers-by, carrying home their Sunday’s dinner from the baker’s oven.
Mrs. Miles glanced round indignantly at her husband and two children, and could discover nothing—unless a pleasing picture of domestic felicity, which ought to have excited admiration or envy, not contempt—to account for the derision with which even some of her own particular friends were regarding the family, till she looked behind her, and then Mrs. Miles saw it all.
To her horror, Mrs. Miles found that Prince was scouring along close to heel, bearing a whole roast duck by his teeth in its back. He had been unable to pass the baker’s door, though the shutter was on the window: having entered, his nose had beguiled him into a more daring and serious crime than the petty pilfering which was the usual extent of his delinquencies. And Mrs. Miles could not create the scandal on the Sunday, with the parson coming out of the rectory at her back, of having the dog pursued and deprived of his prey.
That night, while Mr. Miles—though he had not liked the laugh when it was sounding in his ears any better because he had often raised such himself—after he had escaped the cackle, took the matter easily, like a philosopher, Mrs. Miles was, as she would have described it, “in a sad way;” she felt as if her own and her husband’s good name were at stake, and that they might be unjustly accused of sharing in the toothsome dainty, basely come by, and for which some Sunday dinner had waited in vain. She renounced Prince with a groan. But next morning, when the dog stood letting Freddy harness him with pack-thread, Nanse thought better of it. She judged correctly that Prince was only a dumb brute; when the worst came to the worst, she was not certain whether Uncle Jerry were not accountable for Prince’s bad tricks, and whether she and Miles, as Uncle Jerry’s representatives, did not owe the dog some reparation for the cruel wrong done him.
