Dominic was a lively one, always up to something. One day, more restless than usual, he decided there wasn't enough going on in his own neighborhood to satisfy his need for adventure. He just had to get away.
He owned an assortment of hats which he like to wear, not for warmth or for shade or to shield him from rain, but for their various effects—rakish, dashing, solemn, or martial. He packed them, together with his precious piccolo and a few other things, in a large bandana which he tied to the end of a stick so it could be carried over his shoulder.
Too impatient to dash around saying goodbye to everyone, he hammered this note to his door: "Dear Friends, I am leaving in rather a hurry to see more of the world, so I have no time to say goodbye to you individually. I embrace you all and sniff you with love. I don't know when I'll be back. But back I will be. Dominic."
He locked the door, buried the key, and left home to seek his fortune—that is, to look for whatever it was that was going to happen to him out there in the unknown world.
He took the high road going easy so he could greet the sunrise as soon as it arrived, and also the nightfall. But he didn't travel in a straight line. He was forever leaving the road, coming back to it and leaving again, investigating the source of every smell and sound, every sight that intrigued him. Nothing escaped his ardent attention.
On the second day of his journey, he reached a fork in the road and he wondered whether to go the way that veered off to the led or the one that curved over to the right. He would have been happy to go both ways at once. Since that was impossible, he flipped a coin—heads for the left, tails for the right. It fell on tails, so he chased his own tail three times around and took the road that curved over to the right.
By and by, there was an exceptional smell, one he had never encountered before, and hurrying toward it, as he always hurried toward every development, he came to another fork in the road, and there a witch-alligator stood, resting on a cane and looking as if she had been expecting him.
Dominic had never seen a witch-alligator. Though all smells engaged his interest, he wasn't sure he liked this particular one, and it seemed to him that she had many more teeth than were necessary for any ordinary dental purpose. Still, he greeted her in his usual high-spirited way: "Good morning! Happy day to us all!"
"Good morning to you," said the witch. "Do you know where you're going?" "Not at all," Dominic said with a laugh. "I'm going wherever my fortune tells me to go."
"And would you like to know your fortune?" the witch asked, adjusting the fringes of her shawl. "I can see the future just as clearly as the present and more clearly than I can recall the past. For twenty-five cents I'll reveal your immediate prospects- what is in store for you during the next few days. For half a dollar I'll describe the next full year of your life. For a dollar you can have your complete history, unexpurgated, from now to the finish."
Dominic thought a moment. Curious as he was about everything, especially everything concerning himself, he preferred to do his own learning. "I'm certainly interested in my fortune," he said. "Yet I think it would be much more fine to find out what happens when it happens. I like to be taken by surprise."
"Well," said the witch, "I know everything that's going to happen to you." Then she remarked that Dominic was unusually wise for so young a dog and offered him a bit of information. "I hope you don't mind if I tell you this much," she said. "That road over there on the right goes nowhere. There's not a bit of magic up that road, no adventure, no surprise, nothing to discover or wonder at. Even the scenery is humdrum. You'd soon grow too much introspective. You'd take to daydreaming and tail-twiddling, get absent-minded and lazy, forget where you are and what you're about, sleep more than one should, and be wretchedly-bores. Furthermore, after a while, you'd reach a dead end and you'd have to come all that dreary way back to right here where we're standing now, only it wouldn't be now, it would be some woefully wasted time later.
"Now this road, the one on the left," she said, her heavy eyes glowing, "this road keeps right on going, as far as anyone cares to go, and if you take it, believe me, you'll never find yourself wondering what you might have missed by not taking the other. Up this road, which looks the same at the beginning, but is really ever so different, things will happen that you never could have guessed at- marvelous, unbelievable things. Up this way is where adventure is. I'm pretty sure I know which way you'll go." And she smiled, exposing all righty teeth.
Dominic feverishly opened his big, polka-dotted bandanna, pulled out some sardines, and gave them to the witch, who consumed them in a gulp. He thanked her for her good advice and went high-tailing it up the road to the left, the road to adventure.