His was a spirit truly Greek.

I knew it by reason of his inexhaustible enthusiasm for this present sport after a year's proving that chased birds will rise strangely but expertly into air that no dog can climb by any device of whining, leaping, or straining.
Living on into the Renaissance, I saw that Jim would be taught the grievous thing called wisdom--would learn his limitations and to form habits tamely contrary to his natural Greek likings.

Then would he honorably neglect rabbits and all fur, cease pointing droves of pigs, and quit the silly chase of robins.

Under check-cord and spike-collar he would become a fast and stylish dog, clean-cut in his bird work, perhaps a field-trial winner.

He would learn to take reproof amiably, to "heel" at a word, to respect the whistle at any distance, to be steady to shot and wing, to retrieve promptly from land or water, and never to bolt or range beyond control or be guilty of false pointing.
I knew that coercion, steadily and tactfully applied, would thus educate him, for was he not of champion ancestry, wearing his pedigree in his looks, with the narrow shoulders so desirable and so rarely found, with just the right number of hairs at the end of his tail, the forelegs properly feathered, the feet and ankles strong, the right amount of leather in his ear to the fraction of an inch,--a dog, in short, of beauty, style, speed, nose, and brains?
But in this full moment of a glad morning I resolved that Jim should never know the Renaissance; he should never emerge from what Mrs.Potts had gracefully described as "the golden age of Pericles." To the end of his days he should be blithely, naively Greek; a dog of wretched field manners, pointing cattle and quail impartially, shamefully gun-shy, inconsequent, volatile, ignorant, forever paganly joyous without due cause.