"LOW LIFE." 17

 nomenclature. There was generally a Gussy or a Louie, and
 there were twice Fredericks and once a Marmaduke. The
 dog's first master styled the waif, either in high-reaching
 ambition or in smouldering satire, "Prince;" and Prince, not
 President, he is likely to continue till the day of his death.
 It is no reproach to Prince's powers of memory-which,
 at the same time, were only remarkable in what were to him
 the parallel lines of meals and feuds-that they could not carry
 him back beyond that era in puppyhood when he was found,
 in one of the back slums of London, doing brave battle with a
 dog twice his size and age for a gnawed crust.
 Unquestionably, Prince had not first seen the light in
 such a dainty kennel as might have impressed his juvenile
 imagination, and the loss of which would have made a crisis
 in his early history. The probability was that he was the
 puppy of some poor working dog, such as he himself became
 in after-life; and that the dog's proprietor, after having toler-
 "ated him for a few weeks-during which he showed no signs
 of growing up of any particular value, and when no fellow-
 "workman fancied the pup "-had either separated him from
 his parent, and cast him adrift on the world, or had suffered
 him to be lost in the street, and thrown on the tender mercies
 of the police, as the easiest solution of the difficulty-happily
 less insurmountable than that of Ginx's spare baby.
 But the finder of Prince was not a policeman. He was
a little boy named Jack, who was almost as audacious and
reckless as the puppy, with the delight of a child in a young
dog-especially in a young dog which is treasure-trove, and
when there is the fraction of a chance he may be permitted
to retain it as his own property. He decoyed Prince, still a
 c