Louisa and Frederick sing, their mouths round as flowers, and their song rises shrill and clear on the morning air. But suddenly the sound catches in Frederick's wind pipe.
What power invisible has strangled the song in this schoolboy throat?
It is fear. Each day inevitably, at the end of the village street, he meets the dog that belongs to the big butcher, and each day his heart shrivels and his legs grow weak at the sight. It is not the pig man's dog ever attacks or menaces him. He just sits peaceably on the threshold of his master's shop. But he is black, and his eyes are fixed and bloodshot, and sharp, white teeth show beneath his baboon jaws. He is terrifying. And then he sits there in the midst of all sorts of meat cut up for pies and hashes, and seems the more terrible on that account. Of course no one supposes he has been the cause of all this carnage, but he presides over it. He's a fierce dog, the pig man's. And so, as far away as Frederick can see him in the doorway, he picks up a big stone, following the example of men he has seen arm themselves in this way against surly dogs, and goes hugging the wall of the house across the street from the pig butcher's closely.