CURRENT LITERATURE.
Pompey's Peril. Written for the Zoophilist by Mrs. Cashel Hoey. (Published by the Society for the Protection of Animals from Vivi- section.)—This is a story full of liveliness and humour, in which the hero, "a certain wiry-haired terrier, yellowish of colour, playful of disposition, tender and true of character, with soft, brown eyes," runs the greatest possible risk (from which he is only just saved) of being betrayed into a physiological laboratory. Pompey belongs to a coachman in a Kensington mews. How admirably Mrs. Rosy enters into Pompey's character, the following brief passage from his master's description of him will show :- " He's that knowledgeable,' said Dick Traynor, one day, with pride, to a credible witness, 'I'd a'most trust him to count the corn- sacks, and as for tramps ! None of your song-book and fortune-telling 'customers makes off with my horse-cloths if Pompey is about, and he generally is. Bleat if he don't think he's got the whole Mews to look after. Pliceman X we call him at home. Why, there's our Bessy, that dog's as partic'lar about her going to school as the Board visitor hisself,—couldn't make out why she was kep' at home when she htkcl her throat bad, and fetched her basket off the shelf to my miseis, to have her bit of lunch put in it, reg'lar. We got it all ready one day, and he started off with it in his mouth, and stood waggin' his tail, most comical, at the bottom of the Mews—but when he found it was no go, and had been imposed on, he came bank a trailin' his tail in the mud, and down-hearteder and disappointeder than a Christian. "Don't deceive him any more, father," says our Bessy, " it cuts into his feelin's, and it hurts his pride ; isn't he just tellin' us that with his eyes ?"—and so he was. You mightn't believe it if you didn't see it, but Pompey, he brought back the basket and dropped it on the floor just under the shelf; and down he lay with his tail straight out and his nose along of his paws, saying nothing to nobody, and even a bone wouldn't bring him round for ever so long.' "
The Zoophilist does well to enliven its interesting pages with such stories as this, which, without harrowing the soul, really shows in the most practical form the profound inhumanity of a practice which so many physicians now assure us is not only admissible, but highly laudable, and the agitation against which they describe as both mis- chievous and absurd. Mrs. }key has given to her little tale genuine force and brightness.
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