I promised him as he lay there that he should never be compelled to learn any but the fewest facts necessary to make him as harmless as he was happy; chiefly not to bark at old ladies and babies, no matter how threatening their aspect, as they passed our house.

A few things he had already learned--to avoid fences of the barbed wire, to respect the big cat from across the way who sometimes called and treated him with watchful disdain, and not to chew a baby robin if by any chance he caught one.
This last had been a hard lesson, his first contact with a problem only a few days younger than Eden itself.

It came to his understanding, however, that if you mouth a helpless baby robin, a hand or a stick falls upon you hurtfully, even if you evade it for the moment and seclude yourself under a porch until it would seem that so trifling an occurrence must have been utterly forgotten.

This was the one big sin--sin, to the best of our knowledge, being obedience to any natural desire, the satisfaction of which is unaccountably followed by pain.
I told him this would probably be all that he need ever know; and he looked up at me in a fashion he has, the silky brown ears falling either side of the white face.

It is a look of languishing, melting adoration, and if I face him steadily, he must always turn away as if to avoid being overcome--as if the sight of beauty so great as mine could be borne full in the eyes only for the briefest of moments.
But Clem came now, ranging my breakfast dishes about the bowl of plum flowers, and I approached the table with all the ardor he could have wished at his softly spoken, "Yo' is suhved, Mahstah Majah." The sight of Clem, however, inevitably suggests the person to whom I am indebted for his sustaining ministrations.