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- 2 - daily walks, but it is not always easy, for they can be very persistent. Sometimes I will find myself speaking very sternly to some attractive brown-eyed spaniel, ordering it in my severest tones to "stay home, now; STAY HOME!" And the dog will stare back at me with that hurt expression that only a nice dog knows how to assume, making me feel a heartless curmudgeon. I turn and walk on for fifty yards, look back, and see the deeply offended animal still staring balefully at me. I turn again and resume my walk for a further fifty yards when - that feeling again! - 1 look behind me, and there is Towzer nonchalantly trotting along at my heels. For who knows better than an artful dog that the Dumb Walking Man is in reality a softie, a pushover? Sometimes I may have three or four assorted canines escorting me on my way, and often one or more will accompany me all the way back to my house, and again stare at me with that scandalized look when not allowed to come in for a visit. And I worry lest they be unable to find their way home, though they usually seem to do so. But it is wrong in principle. We have local bylaws forbidding dogs to be at large, unaccompanied, on the streets - which rules are far too often ignored and flouted. A dog with its unquestioning love and devotion gives us much, and is entitled to something more in exchange than mere shelter and victuals. For, unlike a cat, a dog longs for human companionship far more than for food and shelter, and a walk in company with a human friend is a dog's highest form of pleasure. I am convinced that if every dog owner could bring him or herself, every morning and every evening, to perform the simple unselfish task of giving his canine friend a regular walk - a REAL walk, not just fifty yards up the road to defecate on someone else's lawn - the dog, knowing it could with faith and confidence look forward to this session with its favorite human, would stay happily indoors or in its kennel during the day and never succumb to the itch to follow a stranger. But my daily walk takes me past many an affluent-looking residence whose open empty double garage doors reveal that both grownups are away at work, the children at school, and a lonely dog put outside to fend for itself. If I were such a dog - particularly one of the nice animals with which I have become friendly - 1 am sure that nothing would deter me from attaching myself to that Quiet Pedestrian who so regularly passes by! [From "Nature Diary of a Quiet Pedestrian", by Philip Croft] THE TREES, by Philip Larkin The trees are coming into leaf Like something almost being said; The recent buds relax and spread, Their greenness is a kind of grief. Is it that they are bom again And we grow old? No, they die too. Their yearly trick of looking new Is written down in rings of grain. Yet still the unresting castles thresh In full-grown thickness every May. Last year is dead, they seem to say, Begin afresh, afresh, afresh. /3