The Scotch-Irish are fine storytellers. They can make you feel wind and snow and hunger. And there was plenty of each that winter of 1888, blowing down from Canada through the drifted hills of New England and the folded wilderness of the Adirondack Mountains over lakes with Indian names and towns with English names and Dutch names, all the way to Albany, which is the state capital of New York.

It was a wizard of a winter. It came to a nasty end in March with a storm known as the Blizzard of '88 which is still in the history books because it buried New York City and made it very hard to cross streets, if you could find them.

"I came into Albany from the West," said Owney, "People have written a lot of histories about me, and one story is as good as another, although some have made me mad enough to bite. But, as I recall, I was from around Amsterdam way. My people were originally canal dogs, the Erie Canal, you know. It ran from Albany to Buffalo. Lots of rats on those old grain barges, and we were mostly terriers.

"I was living from barn to barn at the time, on not many mice and all of them thin. Once in awhile I'd find a meal from some farmer slopping his hogs. Most of them were Dutchmen. The farmers, not the hogs. They were natives of New York State, and mighty skinny that winter. Oh, that cold..."

The snow in the cobbled streets of Albany squeaked as the frost drove deep and the wind was a talcum powder of blown ice. The little dog wobbled in that wind with his tail tucked between his legs. He was weak and heavy-laden with the swordpoints that ice had made of his fur. He moved along empty streets. The cold had driven people deep into their houses, and many of them even deeper into their beds. Even the storefronts showed blank faces.

As the dog turned a corner, ruddered around by the icy wind, he saw two huge dray horses under a roof over a loading platform. Horse blankets fluffed over their broad backs, and their rumps were turned toward the North Pole to protect their heads, which faced a closed door on the building side of the platform.

The dog, guided by alternating jets of steam from the horses' nostrils, sidled up a ramp to a corner of the platform.

"I was ready to die, I think," said Owney, "when a man came out on that platform and left a big sliding door open a crack. The warmth from that opening gave me new hope. Fortunately, it was big enough. I was inside before you could say 'neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.' That's a Post Office slogan, you know. Anyhow, there I was. I didn't know it at the time, but I was in the Albany Post Office."

"Wowie ow," breathed Gib.

"And at the beginning of a distinguished career," continued the dog firmly. "I was lost, hungry and cold like somebody else I know...."

"I am not cold," said Gib.

"I was. I couldn't get warm enough so I found a stack of empty canvas mail sacks and went to sleep. There were men around but they were too busy to notice me. How I slept!"

"It was a young fellow that found me the next day. His mother worked in a shirt factory in Troy, New York. He smelled real fresh, like an apple from a farmer's bin. He had two big cheese sandwiches from lunch that he shared with me.... You'll have to see it, you know...."

Gib saw the little dog step from the mail sack, stretch, scratch and look about the big, barny back room the next day. He heard a strapping young man wearing a heavy, blue wool shirt and red suspenders laugh and shout.

"Look here," he yelled. "We've got a visitor. Oh, you poor skinny tike. Come here, pooch. You need a friend.

Don't fret, old tanglehead. Nobody's going to heave you out in the cold today."

Not that day or any other. Gib saw it all right. He watched the Scotch-Irish terrier walk right into the hearts of those men at Albany as a busy dog can if he pays attention to business.

He saw Owney romp with the clerks and chat with the customers who came into the Post Office to buy a two-cent stamp. Owney supervised the lighting of the big coal-oil lamps at night and spoke sternly to the horses which drew the heavy mail wagons to and from the railway station. He read the postal regulations on the bulletin boards, generally from the shoulders of some laughing clerk, and also the advertisements of the railroads offering lands for sale in the West.

Gib saw it all. He watched Owney organize the postal cats to handle the mice while he devoted his attentions to the postal rats. He shared the dog's excitement the night that the Albany Post Office Glee Club took Owney to howl soprano at the big minstrel show in the Grange Hall.

Gib was right there when the big, dignified man with the flowered vest and the twisted gold watch chain summoned Owney into the postmaster's office.

"There is nothing in the regulations," said the man, "which prevents us from having a dog on the payroll. I think that the Postmaster General, Mr. Don M. Dickinson of Michigan who is a personal friend of President Cleveland, would agree. Your rating around here is now permanent, with food and keep. I would offer you a cigar, but you would eat it and stain your whiskers. Besides I need them for my visits to the State Senate chambers. I would caution you against a failing of the Scotch and the Irish that you are. Wandering ... restlessness ... each great people tends to rove.... Resume your duties, sir."

Gib had the funny notion that he was sitting outside his own skin, far away from the world on another planet entirely. But no, he was right in the Smithsonian. Owney was still talking.

"That Albany postmaster was a good man," said Owney, "and I deserved the warning. I had made a few side trips away from the office."

"You what?" asked Gib.

"I had gone out with the mail bags. Perfectly normal thing to do if one wants to understand the postal system. Easy to do too. Nip up on the wagon. Go down to the station, into the railway car or the baggage car with the mail and away.

"But the first time I stayed away from the office too long. I went to Buffalo. There was a certain lady terrier there I had to see, a lady canal dog. It took me two weeks to explain that it was best that she forget me, and another week to find transportation back to Albany.

"I had forgotten my duty, failed my friends. Many thought I had deserted my post or possibly come to harm. That's when the postmaster called me in for our discussion.

"Right after that he saw to it that I had a collar with my name upon it and my address. Addresses are important in mail circles. There was also a small card attached asking postal clerks to record the name of any office I might choose to visit in the future before mailing me home.

"The postmaster's courtesy gave me new desire to achieve my goal.

"I was determined to be the first dog postal inspector!"

Gib shifted his knees. They were cramped.

"What's that?" he asked.

Owney cleared his throat. He sat up on his haunches, his forepaws raised for attention.

"The Postal Inspection Service is the investigative, fact-finding, and internal audit organization of the postal establishment. It has the basic function of reporting to the Postmaster General on the condition and needs of the service and preventing, detecting and investigation postal crimes."

"Well," said Gib thoughtfully, "as I tell my father when I don't understand something, I can hear, all right."

"I didn't want to travel for fun," growled Owney. "I wanted to be the first dog detective in the Post Office Department. Biting mail robbers, looking for funny stuff in the sacks, sniffing out crooks, guarding the United States mail"

"Like Lassie and TV?" asked Gib.

Owney howled. "No, no, no, noOOOOO! And not like Rin-Tin-Tin, or Old Dog Tray, or Bugle Ann either. Just an honest government detective doing a good job stamping out crime ... Of course, I had my dreams...."

"I'm sorry," said Gib in a small voice. "I think I understand."

"Well," said Owney, his tail thumping for emphasis.

"Then you'll understand that I didn't want to be anybody's pet, and you'll understand that I had to keep my ambitious pretty secret. In my day, dogs were supposed to chase rabbits, rats, balls and sticks and save little girls from drowning. They were supposed to watch chicken coops and bark a lot at night. They were supposed to follow boys all day too...." He paused and looked up into Gib's face. "I suppose your dog follows you around all the time?"

"Sleeps under my bed too," said Gib.

"In it sometimes?"

"He's not supposed to sleep in it."

"Sometimes?"

Gib rumpled Owney's back. "Mostly," he said

"Hmmn, hmmn," whined Owney. "Must be nice. But then he isn't a career animal. However, if your dog lets you sleep with him, he's probably told you some of the handicaps he faces.

"The rules of being a dog are pretty strict, you know. I couldn't go about talking to my fellow workers. Bark, yes. Whine, yes. Tail signals, to be sure. Following instructions, certainly. But no talking. I had to read the postal manuals, directions, that is, at night so that nobody would know I was studying. I couldn't make any close friends. Inspectors have to be suspicious. But I kept my distance and my dignity while being pleasant to all.

"If you write to the Post Office Department in Washington, my people will send you literature about me. It says I was very lovable and immensely popular."

Gib interrupted. "The postmen around Lindenwold, New Jersey, don't like dogs much," he said.

"Not surprising," said Owney. "More than eight thousand postmen are bitten each year by dogs who take their guard and sentry duties seriously. I was not a house dog. I was a public servant. "Here, in the Smithsonian, even if undusted, I've had time to realize that I was something of a novelty in postal circles. My visits and travels. The road was my home. Where the mail sacks went, there went 1, on duty, of course. Albany was my home office."

"Where did you go?" asked Gib. "I'd only been to Atlantic City, Philadelphia and the World's Fair in New York in my whole life before I came to Washington and got lost in this old Smithsonian."

Owney thumped his tail in thought.

"So far, so long ago," said the dog slowly. "Gilbert, think as big as you can about this wonderful, big country in a time when there were no telephones, no radios, no television, no automobiles and airplanes all over the place. There was electricity. But country people lighted their homes with oil lamps and city people read by gaslight. Sure enough, there were horses and buggies, canal barges and riverboats, even bicycles and balloons, and lots of people walking. But all of the distance there is, and not many roads through it, was wrapped into one bundle by three things, the telegraph wires, the railroads and the United States Post Office Department. Mostly it was the railroads and the mail that let the country know that the East and the West and the North and the South added up to one.

"In 1890 there were twice as many post offices as there are today. I got into quite a few of them."

It was quiet in the Smithsonian, but Gib's head was filled with the sound of iron wheels on steel tracks, of whistles blowing past a thousand road crossings in the dark night so that lonely sleepers who heard without hearing could turn over and snore and know comfort and friendship. Gib could see Owney, curled up on a stack of sacks, his nose tuned to a crack in the door of a baggage car, sniffing new-mown hay in the fields of southern Ohio, waiting for the ripe smell of mud to announce the Ohio River and Cincinnati. The tracks clicked the name of the Cincinnati, Hamilton and Dayton Railroad.

Gib saw Owney jumping from a car of the Richmond and West Point Terminal Railroad and riding a van with the sacks to the Richmond Post Office where the clerks called him a "Yankee kiyoodle" and put a tiny Confederate flag in his collar before mailing him north to Washington where he joined the Pennsylvania Railroad for a ride into Philadelphia.

Gib saw Owney barking wildly at the hearty smells of the West where Indians who lived on reservations would still eat dog meat if they could get it. He saw Owney riding the curves of the St. Paul, Minneapolis and Manitoba Railroad all the way to Great Falls, Montana, where the Post Office workers gave him antelope bones for a snack on the ride East to Chicago.

"That's where I did my first real inspection-detection work," said Owney. "The Chicago Tribune, a newspaper, called me a noble beast.