DOG-SHEARERS AND SCHOOLMASTERS.
By Pastor Wagner
[Pastor Wagner, in S. S. Times.] ON a Paris square, not far from the old palaces of our kings, stands, winter and summer, a stern looking old fellow with a long, flowing beard. He is a dog-shearer, an important personage. He receives confidences and gives medical advice. I saw a lady the other day approach him with a timid air, such an air as mamas wear when they take their tender offspring to the high and mighty head-master. She carried, under her wrap, a young dog on the subject of which she wished to consult the old man. Without getting up or taking off his hat (certain functions are incompatible with those expressions of a shallow civility), the man declared, in brief harsh words, that the dog had no style. "These ears hang too low, that tail is too long. All this must be altered." The lady grew slightly paler, but mastered her emotion. She was trying to find something to say, but the man had already seized the dog, saying, "Leave it to me. You will see. It won't take long." Then, from his bag of tools, he took two little iron rulers which he screwed on to the patient's ears. This done, he took a razor, and neatly cut off all that projected beyond the line thus marked. Then he seized a pair of large shears, and with a practised gesture docked the tail. The poor lady was nearer dead than alive; the dog, petrified with terror, did not even yelp. Whimpering, he shook his two poor red remnants of ears and his poor bleeding stump of a tail. As for the man, triumphant, but with undiminished dignity, he said, "Now, madame, you may say you have a dog. Forty sous, please." Rather rough, I thought, but I have seen the same thing elsewhere. Is it not thus human education is sometimes carried on? Behold a little initiative showing the tip of its ear,—a little originality, a longing to think freely or believe independently, to be somebody,—in a word, not after the exact pattern of everybody. This is not to be tolerated. The individual must be brought to the regulation type. If he has it not by inheritance, it must be forcibly stamped upon him. Nature, no doubt, revolts; good sense utters its protest; but those convinced of the excellence of their methods are not held in check by such a small matter: "Leave it to me; it won't take long!" You give into their hands the rudiments of a man; they give you back a creature after the commonest pattern, docked of the most precious thing about him. The price is such and such. Give your forty sous without grumbling. One could not pay too much for such a fine piece of work.