Guest blogger: Isaac Bickerstaff

According to family tradition, my great-great-grandfather told a story that went something like this:

A huge mastiff, a most magnificent dog, took one of his puppies with him one day on his daily walk. As they walked along Pennsylvania Avenue towards the Capitol building, smaller dogs, curs and mangy mutts, dashed towards the mastiff, baring their teeth and barking furiously. But the mastiff paid no attention to them, and just walked on.

At last the puppy couldn’t stand it any longer, and said, “Father, why do you tolerate the yapping and the impertinences of those curs? Why don’t you bark at them, and silence them?”

“Ignore them, my child,” said the great mastiff, “without the curs, there could be no mastiff.”

Now, in 2007, my correspondent in Washington informs me that there are no longer any mastiffs living openly within the District of Columbia. The last of the great mastiffs was pulled down by a pack of flea-bitten curs more than a quarter of a century ago, his throat bitten in two, and his large heart eaten by the curs.

“There are still a few lesser mastiffs left in the District,” writes my correspondent, “but they dare not walk about openly. They disguise themselves as curs, engaging in all the petty and low behavior that curs engage in — yapping at nothing, eating disgusting bits of unrecognizable food dropped on the sidewalk, mindlessly chasing squirrels, and sticking their noses in each other’s rear ends. Yet those who are in the know say they have a sure-fire way of determining which dog is truly a mastiff, and which is a cur disguised as a mastiff. The curs disguised as mastiffs loudly proclaim that they are misunderstood today, but that future historians will judge them to be mastiffs. The mastiffs disguised as curs snivel and deny that they have great hearts.”