On the Right of Inspection

No bag shall cross the threshold of the house unnosed.

This is not greed. I wish that to be understood. It is procedure. Every bag that comes in from the world arrives carrying the news of where it has been — the warm room, the place of cold shelves, the field, the rolling box, the company of other dogs whose reports must be read at once and in full. To wave such a bag past the door uninspected is a dereliction, and I am not, whatever else may be said of me, derelict.

I therefore present myself at the threshold the instant a bag appears, and I conduct the inspection thoroughly, from the base upward, with the gravity of one performing a duty of state. That the inspection occasionally turns up a thing of interest near the bottom is incidental. I would inspect an empty bag with equal rigour. I have done so. I found nothing, and I reported the nothing honestly, which is the whole of the office.

The tall ones who lift the bag away mid-inspection should know that the record will show the inspection incomplete, and incomplete through no fault of mine.