"LOW LIFE." 27

while Jack had become peripatetic in his vocation, and moved
rapidly from one wretched lodging-house to another.
 But, truth to tell, Prince did not attempt to make the
discovery. He was too stupid, and too prostrated by slow
starvation, to do more than prowl about the immediate neigh-
bourhood of his yard, and stump-for Prince no more slank,
not even when he was greatly in the wrong, than he stalked-
back to his den when he was weary, or when some occult
instinct told him that his leave was up.
 Prince was not in some important respects the dog he looks
in his picture when he was living with Mr. Jerry Noakes. He
is a fairly well-fed dog, and in excellent condition, as we see
him; but in those hard times he was reduced to skin and
bone, his ribs could be counted, his mongrel disproportions
were exposed in all their ugliness, and there was a wild look-
that of a creature at bay, and which struck people as unsafe
-about the dog.
 Yet the lamentable change on the outer dog was not the
worst result of Prince's residence with Mr. Jerry Noakes; the
inner dog was undergoing as sure a deterioration. Any good
that had been in Prince was being stamped out of him. He
was hardening back into the original savage wolf or jackal.
His truth and honesty, which had heen his best domestic
qualities, were being corrupted and sapped to the foundation.
 With Jack's family Prince had been-well, free and easy
in his practices; but the whole family had been free and easy
in their ways, and anything like deliberate, premeditated
larceny was unknown to the dog. There was all the difference
that there is between manslaughter and murder in Prince's
helping himself occasionally when the opportunity came unex-