"Good sir, or madam, as it may be -- we most willingly embrace the offer of your friendship. We long have known your excellent qualities. We have wished to have you o us; to hold you within the very innermost fold of our heart. We have no reserve towards a person of your open and ure. The frankness of your humour suits us exactly. We have been long looking for such a friend. Quick -- let us disburthen our troubles into each others bosom -- let us make our single joys shine by reduplication -- But yap, yap, yap! -- what is this founded cur? he has fastened his tooth, which is none of the blu, just in the fleshy part of my leg."
"It is my dog, sir. You must love him for my sake. Here, Test -- Test -- Test!"
"But he has bitten me."
"Ay, that he is apt to do, till you are better acquainted with him. I have had him three years. He never bites me."
Yap, yap, yap! -- "He is at it again."
"Oh, sir, you must not kick him. He does not like to he kicked. I expect my dog to be treated with all the respect due to myself" [p 267]
"But do you always take him out with you, when you go a friendship-hunting?
"Invariably. `Tis the sweetest, prettiest, best-ditioned animal. I call him my test -- the touchstone by which I try a friend. No one properly be said to love me, who does not love him."
"Excuse us, dear sir -- or madam aforesaid -- if upon further sideration we are obliged to dee the otherwise invaluable offer of your friendship. We do not like dogs."
"Mighty well, sir -- you know the ditions -- you may have worse offers. e along, Test."
The above dialogue is not so imaginary, but that, iercourse of life, we have had frequent occasions of breaking off an agreeable intimacy by reason of these e appehey do not always e in the shape of dogs; they sometimes wear the more plausible and human character of kinsfolk, near acquaintances, my friends friend, his partner, his wife, or his children. We could never yet form a friendship -- not to speak of more delicate correspondences -- however much to our taste, without the intervention of some third anomaly, some imperti clog affixed to the relation -- the uood dog in the proverb. The good things of life are not to be had singly, but e to us with a mixture; like a schoolboys holiday, with a task affixed to the tail of it. What a delightful panion is **** if he did not always bring his tall cousin with him! He seems to grow with him; like some of those double births, which we remember to have read of with such wonder and delight in the old "Athenian Oracle," where Swift enced author by writing Pindaric Odes (what a beginning for him!) upon Sir William Temple. There is the picture of the brother, with the little brother peeping out at his shoulder; a species of fraternity, which we have no name of kin close enough to prehend. When **** es, poking in his head and shoulders into your room, as if to feel his entry, you think, surely you have now got him to yourself -- what a three hours chat we shall have! -but, ever in the haunch of him, and before his diffident body is well disclosed in your apartment, appears the haunting shadow of the cousin, over-peering his modest kinsman, and sure to over-lay the expected good talk with his insufferable procerity of stature, and uncorresponding dwarfishness of observation. Misfortunes seldom e alois hard when a blessing es apanied. ot we like Sempronia, without sitting down to chess with her eternal brother? o