"Wot is this; a circus?" says the railroad-man.
But I had no heart in it. I hated to go. I knew I was no "show" dog,
even though Miss Dorothy and the Master did their best to keep me
from shaming them. For before we set out Miss Dorothy brings a man
from town who scrubbed and rubbed me, and sand-papered my tail, which
hurt most awful, and shaved my ears with the Master's razor, so you
could most see clear through 'em, and sprinkles me over with pipe-
clay, till I shines like a Tommy's cross-belts.
"Upon my word!" says Jimmy Jocks when he first sees me. "What a swell
you are! You're the image of your grand-dad when he made his debut at
the Crystal Palace. He took four firsts and three specials." But I
knew he was only trying to throw heart into me. They might scrub, and
they might rub, and they might pipe-clay, but they couldn't pipe-clay
the insides of me, and they was black-and-tan.
Then we came to a Garden, which it was not, but the biggest hall in
the world. Inside there was lines of benches, a few miles long, and
on them sat every dog in the world. If all the dog-snatchers in
Montreal had worked night and day for a year, they couldn't have
caught so many dogs.
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