Front matter (continued 3)

This period of persecution extended over some months, for the muzzles had a bad effect on dog tempers and there were more cases of snapping and nipping than the town, in Sigurd's lifetime, had ever known, though no trace of rabies was detected. It was an anxious season for dog-owners. Our neighboring professor of psychology, she who specialized in spaniels, was overheard by a guest one evening wearily informing a new litter of eight:

"Puppies, this has been a sad day. This morning your ma bit the postman, and this afternoon your pa bit the doctor."

It was a relief to many households when at last the selectmen put their minds on something else.

Although Sigurd was a member of all classes, as well as faculty, and of all societies, he bore, as mascot, a special relation to the Class of 1911, whose color he wore by grace of nature. Glorious he was to behold on Field Day, his coat, well brushed for the occasion, glistening in the sun, a great bow of yellow ribbon standing out like a butterfly from the top of his collar, wagging all over with joyous self-importance as he stood in the front rank of his class, impartially barking applause for both their triumphs and defeats.

With him, as with the girls, the spring term was the climax of the college year, though not precisely an academic climax. Sigurd still found time to drop in at a lecture occasionally, flumping down beside some favorite fellow-student for a brief repose and rousing now and then to thrust up a sentimental paw for a shake. But he had many class-meetings to attend, where, when "Further Remarks" were called for, he has been known to respond with a loud bark,—a recognized indecorum in the college buildings. But on the whole, he kept the rules save in so far as he might be considered "a musical instrument" in use "out of recreation hours."

The spring term bloomed out in guests like crocuses and Sigurd made a point of attending as many as possible of the luncheons and teas given in their honor. An English lady, a poet and a visionary, a presence like a flame, was one afternoon addressing a choice assemblage in our oriental parlor on the mysteries of the Bahist faith. A torch-bearer of the Persian prophet, she was telling of her first interview with Ali Baha on Mount Carmel.

"And the Master greeted me thus: 'O Child of the Kingdom!'"——

Bump went something against the door, which swung wide, admitting Sigurd, who saluted the company with a comprehensive wave of his tail.

"You beautiful creature!" cried the Englishwoman, winning him to her with an outstretched hand, "I am sure you are a Child of the Kingdom," and Sigurd wagged, came up for a pat and dropped down at her feet to slumber out the rest of her impassioned discourse, waking promptly with the arrival of refreshments.

But our Child of the Kingdom, on the very day after he had received this accolade, came home to dinner, for which he had no appetite, not only with a deep scratch, inflicted by the claw of some profane, anti-Bahist cat, down one side of his face, but with his white and golden hair all matted in brown streaks and patches, in witness that a freshman saucepan had spilled its fudge upon him. Where he could get at himself to lick, he enjoyed it very much, but he was deplorably sticky on top.

In the spring, too, there were more dogs about the campus, and battles were frequent. In the interests of academic fellowship we did our best to steer Sigurd clear of encounters with professorial champions, especially Jerry, an Irish terrier who would fight with his own shadow rather than not fight at all, but one morning our chapel vestibule was the scene of an encounter that Isaac Watts might well have called horrendous.

The aggressor was Coco, a fierce little Boston bull and the pride of one of the town's most honored citizens. Coco fought by method and a very effective method it was. He would sneak up to his chosen antagonist, fly at the forehead, tear the flesh so that the streaming blood blinded his enemy and then try for a grip on the throat. Half the dogs in the village already bore Coco's mark when, one March morning, Joy-of-Life and I went in to chapel, leaving Sigurd, as usual, to wait for us outside. As a dog, whom we did not pause to identify, was trotting down the avenue, we laid strict injunctions on Sigurd not to get into a scrap.

The organ was calling all hearts to worship, and heads were already bowed, when suddenly Sigurd, his earnest eyes trying in vain to explain his difficulties, pressed in against our knees. This was a grave breach of chapel decorum, and Joy-of-Life, rising instantly, led him down the aisle. As she opened the door into the vestibule, Coco was upon him, and the snarling fury of a dog-fight jarred against the solemn strains of the organ. I slipped out to find Coco hanging from Sigurd's throat, and Sigurd, blood streaming from his forehead over his face, so hampered by a ring of hands pulling on his collar that he could only snap his jaws in air, unable to see or reach his foe. The choir, arrayed for the processional, had broken line and were banging Coco with hymn books, while everybody was wildly issuing orders to everybody else.

"Let the dogs alone, girls. Look out for yourselves."

"Let Sigurd go. Give him a chance to fight."

"Choke Coco off."

"Twist Coco's tail."

"Bring water."

"Don't put your hands between them, girls. Keep away."

The janitor, the only man on the scene, had discreetly climbed into a high window-seat, and it was one of the slenderest, most flowerlike maidens there who finally jerked a half-strangled Coco loose and flung him forth from the sacred portals. The choir promptly reformed in rank and, a trifle flushed and disheveled but chanting more lustily than ever, swung up the aisle with the air of the Church Militant. Only the few who were slightly bitten remained behind to be conducted by Joy-of-Life to the hospital for immediate attention to their wounds, while Sigurd and I made for home, marking the trail with our blood. No real harm was done. Coco's owner, though secretly convinced that Sigurd did all the biting, insisted on paying the doctor's bills and, a few days after the encounter, Sigurd, with a scarred forehead, welcomed his injured defenders to a dinner-party, at which I presided with my arm in a sling. Sigurd seemed to feel a dim responsibility for that hurt of mine and, as long as I wore a bandage, would come up at intervals to give it a penitent lick.

At all the festivals of the spring term Sigurd deemed his attendance indispensable. He fell in with the parades, frisked out into the midst of the campus dances, and once, at least, took a conspicuous part in the Tree Day pageant. A graceful, carmine-clad Narcissus had died to slow music on the bank of Longfellow Fountain. The wood-nymphs and water-nymphs, Diana and her train, even the hilltop Oreads had tripped off the sylvan stage, but the audience, massed on the other side of the pool, refused to take the hint and, instead of breaking up, still sat spell-bound, their gaze fastened on poor Narcissus, who, cramped in the dying attitude, could not conceive any dramatic way of coming to life again. So we bade Sigurd: "Go find," and after two false starts, once for a squirrel and once for a stick, he sped straight for Narcissus and, anxiously thrusting his nose into her face, recognized a special friend and broke into loud barks of joy, while, throwing her arm about him, she sprang no less gladly to her feet. The audience thought it all a part of the pageant, the prevailing opinion being that Sigurd was playing the rôle of Cerberus and welcoming Narcissus to Hades.

But for all his years of enthusiastic college attendance, Sigurd never took a degree. Not even his own Class of 1911 was allowed to carry out its design of dressing their mascot in a specially made cap and gown and leading him with them in the Commencement procession. His B.A. stood only for Beloved Animal.

TO SIGURD

FAREWELLS

—Blake's Dedication to Queen Charlotte.

We were slow to realize that Sigurd was having too many birthdays. That guardian figure stretched out on the south porch just above the steps, shining like an embodied welcome, had become a part of life itself. Indeed, a caller, not famed for tact, after surveying our Volsung for some time in silence, dropped the cryptic remark: "How much a dog comes to look like the family!" Brightening our busy months with golden glints of romp and mischief and caress, he kept his run of birthdays like festivals which brought no warning with them.

They were celebrated with becoming pomp, with much-wrapped gifts that he rejoiced to open himself and often with a yellow tea. As his taste inclined to broad and simple effects, there would be a giant sunflower in the center of the table, with strips of goldenrod emanating from it like rays. The guests, his best-beloved of all ages and conditions, would drink Sigurd's health in orangeade and feast in his honor on sponge cake. From the day of Poor Ellen to that of Housewife Honeyvoice, Amelia, a young and comely Irish Protestant, reigned in the kitchen and made it her pride to celebrate Sigurd's anniversaries with all due splendor, though even then she would not intermit the daily scoldings to which she attributed his very gradual growth in grace. For still he would run away at intervals and wallow in all iniquity. If the prodigal returned by daylight and found us together, he would disport himself at our feet in a brief agony of penitence. As he lay on his back, writhing with remorse and apparently trying to clasp his paws in supplication, we would reproach him, to the accompaniment of his hollow groans, until our gravity would break down. Then he would cheerfully scramble up and fetch us his latest rubber toy, with a coaxing invitation to let bygones be bygones and have a frisk with Sigurd. If he came home under cover of darkness, he would shamelessly go straight to his own piazza corner, venting an indignant grunt, like an outraged man of the house, if he found his supper soggy and his bed not made.

The birthday teas, though they brought so many of his friends across the threshold, were not an unmixed joy to Sigurd. The flaunting bow of new, stiff, yellow ribbon tickled his ears, until he had succeeded in working it around, a rumpled knot, under his chin, and worse yet were the wreaths of yellow wild flowers that the small fingers of some of his child neighbors had woven for his neck. His share of his own birthday cake, too, was more hygienically apportioned than he approved. What is a speck of yellow frosting on a collie's long red tongue? But Amelia saw to it that his birthday dinner was after his own heart,—fresh corncake, rice and liver, while now and then some devoted sophomore, even though the long vacation had put a thousand miles between them, would send him a home-made chocolate cream as large as a saucer, at which he was allowed only to sniff and nibble.

We may have noticed that Sigurd's girth was ampler and his bearing more sedate than in his younger days, but still he was the first in every frolic and almost as fleet as a deer. He roused one at the edge of the woods one morning when he was out for an early airing with Joy-of-Life and chased it across the meadows so fast and far that she was in dismay lest he overtake the beautiful creature and pull it down. Even to the last he would let no dog pass him. His frankest admirer and fellow-runner through his sunset years was a simple-minded young collie whom Sigurd would outwit by wheeling sharply, when he felt Sandy gaining on him, and making off at right angles while the precipitate pursuer sped on for some distance in the old direction. But the goal was what Sigurd chose to make it, and Sandy, bewildered by these subtle tactics, always believed himself outrun.

We had come to regard a walk without Sigurd as hardly a walk at all. Perhaps we observed that he found the heat, which brought out his tormenting eczema, a little harder to bear from summer to summer, but our crisp, crackling winters revived him to all manner of puppy antics. I remember, like a picture, one frosty afternoon, the evergreens festooned with ice, while the leafless trees, struck by the level rays of the western sun, glistened with rainbow crystals. Through this enchanted world, as through the heart of a diamond, Joy-of-Life and Sigurd were coming home. Sigurd, barking his glad music, was bounding hither and thither over the sparkling crust, now trying to fulfill his contract to keep all chickadees and nut-hatches, blue jays and juncos, from alighting on the earth, and now convinced that at last the moment had come when he was to realize his supreme ambition, inherited from Ralph, and catch a crow. Their sardonic caws above his head, as they flapped heavily from pine to pine, made him so furious that he would pounce on their black, sliding shadows, while Joy-of-Life, her cheeks apple-bright with the cold, laughed at him so merrily that he took it for applause.

Yet change was busy about our collie, who welcomed no changes but loved his world exactly as it was. We sold the first home and moved into a more spacious one that we had built on a strip of untamed land hard by. Then a street came, and more houses, and quietly the wildwood drew away from us. Within our own bounds, at least, we strove to keep the forest growth in its own careless beauty, but never a man stepped on the place, brother or guest or gardener or state warden or whosoever, but, driven by the deep instinct of the pioneer, he must needs go stealthily forth with ax or saw or shears and lay about him in our happy tangle. The worst of it was that we had to appear grateful.

Sigurd accepted his new abode with but a passing bewilderment. Racing up from the train on his return from a summer in the mountains with Joy-of-Life, he was whistled into the Scarab while yet too utterly absorbed in the rapture of his greetings to heed where he was. After a little he looked about him in obvious surprise and perplexity and set out at once on a tour of investigation, trotting from cellar to attic, nosing into the closets and under the shelves, sniffing at the familiar desks and bookcases and recognizing with a wag his own chair and rug. As soon as might be he was out of doors, examining porches and paths. Then he crossed the intervening bit of wilderness, granite ledge matted over with the red-berried kinnikinic, and woofed for admittance at his accustomed door. He was kindly received and allowed to go about as he liked, upstairs and downstairs and into my lord's chamber, but the furniture was not his furniture, the smells were not his smells, and within ten minutes he had quitted those rooms, scene of so many puppy exploits, to enter them no more. He knew the difference between house and home.

Yet our new holding did not seem to Sigurd nor to us entirely natural until he had cut one of his unfortunate paws on a broken bottle left by the carpenters as a souvenir and had strewn steps and driveway and lawn with shreds of cotton bandages and adhesive plaster. "When is a clutter not a clutter?" asked my mother, and answered her own conundrum: "When Sigurd does it."

In a snug corner against the south wall of the Scarab stood a massive and elegant erection, with gable roof and olive-green door, that only the unsophisticated called a kennel. It was "Sigurd's House," and as such he accepted it, counting its artistically shingled walls and heavy layers of sheathing paper no more than his just deserts. He delighted in its deep bed of fresh straw which tickled him most agreeably as he rolled over and over in it. He found it an exciting by-play, too, to dash in with stick or bone and lose it under his bedding, which he would proceed to scratch up with all the fury of a New England matron in housecleaning time. Then he would come swaggering out with the air of duty done, shaking his own skin. Sigurd's House was such a palace that the children of the neighborhood liked to play in it, but our collie deemed this high trespass and, from the screened study porch, would roar indignant protest when five or six chubby tots, with that saucy black spaniel, Curly, would all squeeze in together.

To the Scarab came new friends for Sigurd with new caresses, to which he always made cordial and courteous response. Amelia crossed the ocean to a waiting bridegroom and a happy home of her own, but Housewife Honey-voice, with her little Esther, petted Sigurd even more devotedly.

Sigurd's only difficulty with Housewife Honey-voice, the only shadow on their sympathy, arose from the delicacy of her appetite by which she was inclined, at first, to measure his. When her enthusiasm and culinary skill persuaded the family to go on a vegetable diet, Sigurd gave us clearly to understand that we need not count him in. And when I came home, one evening, from a week's motor trip, Sigurd barely waited for his customary chant of welcome before gripping my dress and leading me to the refrigerator.

"Hasn't Sigurd had his dinner yet?"

"Why, yes, an hour ago."

"Nonsense, boy! You're not hungry. Nobody is hungry just after dinner."

"What a whopper!" sighed Sigurd, as he pattered after me back to the study.

No sooner had I turned my attention to the accumulation of letters on my desk than again Sigurd pulled gently, yet with determination, at my skirt and insisted on a second promenade to the refrigerator.

"He really is hungry. How much have you been giving him for dinner?"

But when I saw the measure, I heaped his plate, while he eagerly watched the process, waving his tail in triumph, but hurrying once across the kitchen to snuggle his head against the knee of Housewife Honey-voice, looking up at her with those comprehending, trustful eyes that said:

"You didn't mean to starve dear Sigurd, and now that you know how big my hollow is, it will be all right forever."

Every autumn a new horde of freshmen fell in love with him and visiting alumnæ embraced him in mid-campus. Toward the Freshman Twins, who gladdened the Scarab one year, he conducted himself like a sophomore, humoring their childish ways, guiding them through the college labyrinth, serving as a towel for their homesick tears and partaking freely of their consoling fudge, but all with a comical air of condescension. He was himself accustomed to the best society, even seniors. Our gracious college president made him welcome to her veranda, as she sat at tea among her roses; a beloved frequenter of the Scarab, Hoops-of-Steel, though clinging to her preference for boys, accorded him a true if tempered friendship; and even Scholar Carol, our fifteenth-century historian, who affected the fireside sphinx and had named a particularly gallant kitten Eddy IV, counted him only a little lower than a cat. As for the children on our hill, they hugged him to the limit of endurance. His warmest admirer among them was Wee-wee, a rosy bunch of unweariable energy, who, when she came to us of an afternoon in order to give her exhausted parents a brief respite, would wear out the entire family as, one by one, we undertook to amuse her, and would finally fling herself upon Sigurd, riding on his back, rolling him over and over and examining his paws with an envious admiration that broke forth in the remark: "Wen I'm old and big like Sigurd, maybe I'll have feet on my hands."

For two lively years a brace of graduate students, Cherub and Seraph, folded their wings beneath the Scarab rooftree. Cherub was a bit afraid, at first, of "that bouncing yellow elephant," but Seraph instantly became Sigurd's very pink of playmates. Every morning they would start off early for the college library, scampering across the landscape at a rate that sent the sparrows fluttering from their path like so many irregular verbs. Between the meadow and the campus is a perilous stretch of railway tracks and trolley tracks, and here Sigurd would assume full charge of his companion. If the whistle of an engine, as they drew near the crossing, cut the air, Sigurd would leap upon her and, with his paws upon her breast, hold her back until the train had hurtled by, when he would lead her triumphantly across under the trailing plume of smoke. Every autumnal Sunday they spent hours together in the woods, from which the Seraph would bring home gentians, wych-hazel and a lyric, and Sigurd a ruff all tangled up with burrs. Winter did not daunt their zeal. They formed themselves into a rescue expedition and saved from the frost all manner of wild-flower roots, which the Seraph arranged in rows of pots placed on boards stretched from a little table in her room to her south window. Alas for sweet Saint Charity! There came a day when Sigurd, wishing to study the scenery to verify a suspicion of a dog burglar after his treasure-trove of bones, sprang up and struck his forefeet on the edge of the nearest board with such violence that the whole structure came crashing down, enveloping him in a flying ruin of pots and plants and earth and water. He did not stay to help the Seraph clear up the landslide, but remembered a pressing engagement in the remotest corner of the attic.

Through December these happy comrades explored the fringes of the forest for glowing vines to serve as Christmas decorations, and in the whirling snowstorms of a peculiarly ferocious little February they would come romping home, two white objects plunging through the drifts, looking like Peary and one of his huskies just back from the North Pole. Joy-of-Life had been in Egypt that winter, seeking health after a grave illness, but she came again with April, more welcome than the spring. Sigurd bounded to her shoulders in ecstasy of greeting, his coat ruddy in the sun. He shone more than ever with a supreme content as he sat erect between us while we motored through the miracle of May, under red-budded maples and oaks whose baby leaves, while the orioles shouted to them to hurry up, where trembling from misty pink to golden green. He did not care to run with the machine, however slowly it was driven, but saved his energies for the long rambles with the Seraph, as she went questing for anemone and dogwood, bellwort, violets, columbine, lady slippers and all

As the days grew warmer, he would forget the admonitions of previous springs and all his good resolutions, and take a roll, now and then, to Sister Jane's wrath and anguish, in a bed of jonquils or yellow tulips, claiming that their color made them his by royal right. When we scolded him, he took refuge with the Seraph, though even she was causing him bitter annoyance, as June and Commencement drew near, by her attentions to a fuzzy puppy, Puck, whom she visited almost daily at collie kennels two miles away. He was a prize puppy and it disgusted Sigurd beyond barks to see the fuss we all made over certain dog-show awards that Puck gave the Seraph to bring home, a green ribbon not worth the chewing and an empty cut-glass vase. When Puck, on the eve of Seraph's departure, was himself brought to the Scarab and a journeying basket was equipped for him, Sigurd sulked in the shabby depths of his dear old chair. All the small folk of our neighborhood flocked in to pat Puppy Ki-yi, as Joy-of-Life and I privily dubbed our guest, but only Wee-wee, whose own name for the mite was "Minister—Ittle Teeny Minister, coz he stan's on his back legs an' jiggles his arms an' pweaches at us," divined Sigurd's jealous misery. She snuggled down in the chair beside him, hugging the yellow ball into which he had rolled himself and solicitously explaining that "Minister is the best 'ittle dog, and Sigurd is the best gweat big dog," but the Volsung did not care for a divided homage and shook his ears at all puppy worshipers.

Then the Seraph disappeared, as all his student lovers, one after another, would disappear. Letters came back to him and gifts, but he could not puzzle out what these had to do with the dancing playmate no longer to be found on hillside or by lake. Nor could he foresee the day when that ridiculous Puck, grown into a noble collie, would in his turn sorely miss the Seraph, who had sailed away, on the ship that bore another of Sigurd's most devoted Wellesley lassies, to France. There were dogs on that ship, Professor Peggy and her scarred comrades, veterans of war, that had been sent over, like wounded French officers, to instruct, and were now returning to duty at the front. But Puck, too old for the Red Cross training, was left behind, sniffing up and down the garden paths in patient search for his dainty mistress, who, arrayed in gas-mask and trench-helmet, was serving from a battered camionette hot coffee and cocoa to our boys in khaki just behind the trenches.

In the Orchard, too, the venerable Cousin for whom Sigurd since puppyhood had cherished a romantic attachment, the white-haired inamorata whom he would run to meet with his most grotesque waggle, was no longer to be found in the familiar nooks from which Laddie had long since disappeared. And now that the all-beloved Elder Sister lay mortally ill, Sigurd pattered over day after day to look in at the sickroom and invite a stroking from the delicate hand that would rest so languidly upon his lifted head. Sometimes he carried her a yellow chrysanthemum or a cluster of cream-colored tea-roses tied to his collar. And when she had passed to Paradise through brain-wandering memories of Italy, as through a vestibule of beauty, Sigurd coaxed long at the closed door, whining softly, calling to his friend, troubled by the silence but incredulous of death.

Because of their vanishing ways, Sigurd had early come to look on college girls in general as an inconstant factor in life and accepted their attentions with the casual air of a confirmed old bachelor, but his faithfulness to his friends of riper age never wavered. Even to the last he always raised for the Lady of Cedar Hill his rapturous lyric cry, though it would sometimes embarrass him by breaking into a hoarse and husky squeak. He had special ways with each of us. He kept one piquant game for my mother, who, while he wagged his tail in ever wilder circles at her, would wag her Congregationalist in exact mockery at him, until he would make a maddened leap and snatch that sacred sheet from her hand.

But he was gentle with old people, even in his frolics, and from the first had felt a certain responsibility for their safety. Joy-of-Life had left him late one afternoon, while he was still a youngster, to guard her mother's nap on the piazza couch, but a white flash of Laddie, temptation incarnate, at the foot of the hill, had sent him careering off into the gloaming. Rising hurriedly to call him back, confused by the sudden waking, his charge had missed her footing in the dusk and fallen down the steps. Her first clear consciousness was of Sigurd standing over her, licking her face and hands with a penitent tongue, nor would he leave her all that evening, lying on the edge of her dress as she sat and trotting close beside her whenever she crossed the room. And when, touched by his concern, she bent to him and said: "I wasn't really hurt, and Sigurd was a good dog to come back," he joyously flopped over on his spine and presented his snowy shirt-front for a forgiving pat.

A household dear to Sigurd was that in which two of our college professors, long retired, dwelt in sisterly affection. He bore himself with the utmost discretion there, as if aware of a dignity and fragility beyond the wont of households. The classicist, whose Greek precision of accent gave beauty to her least remark, would introduce Sigurd to callers from abroad as "one of our most distinguished citizens," while the botanist, prisoned in a hooded chair on wheels,—ah, the feet that had so often and so lightly carried her in a day over twenty miles and more of the green earth she loved!—liked to have him escort her on her pathetic airings. He was not with her, but attending his own family on a drive one day, when we saw in the village square before us a sudden commotion, people running from all sides toward that familiar little carriage, which, rashly left standing at the edge of the curb with its hood open toward the wind, had been overset, so that the poor lady, strapped to the seat, was standing on her bonnet. Sigurd reached her first of all and when, shocked by the jar into a momentary oblivion, she looked up, "it was," she afterward said, "right into the kindest, most reassuring brown eyes in the world," for Sigurd's head was drooping close above her own and all the help that a collie could give beamed in his friendly gaze.

Hints of age began to appear, reluctant though we were to recognize them, in Sigurd himself,—an inclination toward longer and longer naps in his own disreputable chair, an increasing resentment of sweeping days and housecleaning, and a tendency, long after a swollen ear or a sharp attack of eczema was cured and Sigurd, settling his chin on his paws, had dismissed Dr. Vet with a low, majestic sweep of tail, to continue to claim the lazy privileges of an invalid. Sometimes his stiffening limbs failed to fold themselves with the old comfort into the hollow of his chair, and he would look up to us in puzzled appeal. He was a handsome collie still, but his manners had grown more reserved and his bearing more stately. He was no longer excited by Commencement festivities, though he would stroll up to take a look at the Tree Day dances and saunter into the Garden Party, accepting the embraces of old friends and new with an amiability only slightly tinged with boredom. But he loved more and more to bask in the sun on the south porch or to dream, his legs tied into his favorite bowknot, in front of the study fireplace, where Joy-of-Life's annual barrel of Christmas driftwood made the flames look like little rainbows on a holiday.

He was almost ten years old when he was run over by an automobile. Except for a bruised paw he did not seem to be hurt, for he crouched so flat in the road that the machine merely scraped his back, but his nerves were severely shaken. When we came home that noon, he greeted us with a prolonged, strange howl, unlike anything that we had ever heard from him before, and for weeks would not venture out upon the roads without one of us to serve as bodyguard, wheedling until we had to drop our books and devise some respectable excuse for a walk. Left behind at a Greek Letter Society House one evening, he refused to start off for home alone—the bold ranger of a thousand midnights—and his indulgent girl hostesses telephoned for a carriage, so that Sigurd came proudly driving up to his front door in a hack. He so enjoyed the extra petting that came with any mischance that he affected, when it occurred to him, this terror long after it had faded out, just as he would in running tuck up an injured foot, when he happened to think of it, weeks after it was healed, and hop plaintively on three legs until the sight of a cat or a squirrel made him forget all about it.

Sigurd had several promising sons in the village, and one of these we would gladly have adopted had not our delight in its puppy graces nearly broken his jealous old heart. So we let it go to other admirers and presently lost all trace of his golden scions. But one day, when I was walking with him, a winsome little lad came up and, touching his cap, asked shyly if he might stroke Sigurd, "for he's the papa of my dog Trusty that died." Poor Trusty was a victim of distemper, and the child softly told us all about it, his arms about the neck of Sigurd, who put on an appropriate expression of bereavement.

The burden of the years brought its own compensation. Instead of the darkling escapades that used to distract and worry us, Sigurd became the best of company, in the depths of a winter night. Joy-of-Life was the lark of the household, and I the owl, so our self-appointed caretaker, after seeing her early to bed, would come downstairs again to lie close against my feet, inviting confidences. When I became too absorbed in my task to answer his remarks, he would still hold forth in a broken conversational grumble, contented, for reply, with the crackling of the fire and the scratching of a pen.

Nor was Sigurd the only one of our blithe fellowship for whom Time was quietly setting up milestones along the changing road. He was still in his prime when, on a date of gleaming memory, the Dryad gave at Norumbega Hall a birthday party for my mother, a party musical with our Poet's own sweet and roguish songs, not only in honor of

but in merry greeting of each of the other guests. The white-crowned mother of Joy-of-Life was there, and the mother of the College Reconciler,

The spirited hostess of Norumbega, a bright-eyed little grandmother immensely proud of that distinction, sat opposite the presiding Dryad, and beside my mother was her Mount Holyoke classmate of the heroic days of Mary Lyon, our gentle Librarian Emeritus, so modest from her long maidenhood that she was distressed at the infant art of aviation, fearing that one could no longer brush one's hair in a dressing-sacque free from the peril of a man swooping down from the clouds to peep in at the window.

It is but a few years since that hour of

"Laurels and laughter and light,"

yet all those smiling elder faces, and not those only, have vanished away.

Sigurd had his part in that fairest of our festivities, for an impressionistic picture of him shines from the stanza that the Dryad addressed to Joy-of-Life:

A saucier dinner-card was mine:

A dagger affixed to this effusion called attention to a learned note:

"This is a scientific error: the beast should be Bufo Lentiginosus not Rana catesbiana. Such errors are common in the best poetry."

As successive sorrows cast their shadows on our hearts, as the mothers slipped away, as the Dryad was smitten down in her brightness, a star fallen from midsummer sky, Sigurd proved himself a very comforter. The sympathetic droop of his ears and decorum of his disconsolate brown eyes in the first hush of mourning and, in the later loneliness, his nuzzling head against the knee, touches of a pleading tongue on hand and cheek, his insistence on an answering smile, a pat, a romp, his conviction that, while sun and wind made holiday and the wood was full of sticks to throw for Sigurd, it was natural to be glad, helped us better than more formal consolations. Both solitude and society, both ignorance and wisdom, he could press close to the hurt without intrusion. Often when one or the other of us, forgetful of the work upon the desk, had let the cloud creep over, Sigurd would rouse himself, trot across to the fireplace, select from the basket a piece of light kindling wood, and present it with the clear intimation that it would be more true to love to cheer up Sigurd with a bit of play than to lose the hour in grieving.

Rarely in his joyful life, and then but for a matter of days or weeks, had we both been away from Sigurd. He hated to have either of us go. He knew only too well the meaning of trunks and suitcases and always stalked uneasily about the room, getting in the way as much as possible, during the process of packing. When at last he saw these objects of ill omen closed and carried downstairs, followed by one of his mistresses in traveling garb, he would desperately take his stand in the doorway and, planting his legs like principles, do his best to bar her exit. For a few days he would be very restless, watchful, anxious, keeping close to the mistress who stayed behind to question her with troubled looks and entreat her not to abandon Sigurd; nor was the missing all on his side. The summer of 1908 was so hot that our gasping collie would tease his friends to fan him and, for the first and only time, we had him shaved. His bright hair, duly cleansed, was made up with corn-colored silk into a sofa-pillow and sent to Joy-of-Life, then sojourning in strange places, now among the Mormons, now on an Indian reservation, gathering material for her two vivid volumes on the Economic Beginnings of the Far West; and she assured him that his "yellow bunch of love" was a magical cure for a certain ache beyond the ken of the doctors. But grievously abashed he was with only the white waves of his ruff, his fore-pantalets and plumy tail unprofaned by the shears, and his sufferings from mortification and mosquitoes outwent all that he had endured from the heat. As his silky under-vest grew long enough to curl, he reminded us of Cagnotte, the supposed poodle bought for three-year-old Gautier by his nurse, on whom the Paris dealers palmed off a cur sewed up in a jacket of lamb's wool.

On summer vacations our Volsung sometimes went up into New Hampshire with one or both of us. He especially rejoiced in our cottage life on Twin Lake, where Sigurd renewed his youth, pursuing

Here he learned to scratch up his own bed in the pine needles and to wash his stick at the edge of the lake after a game, though we never quite succeeded, on account of his masculine prejudices, in teaching him to wash his dinner-plate. There were drawbacks, however, about these summer travels with Sigurd. His first concern, on arriving at a new place, was to go the rounds of the neighborhood and knock over all the dogs. Having thus established our popularity, he proceeded to make himself at home, welcoming most affably the dog-owners who called to complain of his exploits.

One summer he was with Joy-of-Life up in Franconia, where they loved to climb the scenery, Sigurd taking immense satisfaction in his duties as guide. "Find the path, boy," she would bid, and very proudly he would run at a little distance before her, nosing out the way. It was on one of these excursions that he came upon a scattered flock of sheep and—hey presto!—was instantly transformed into a dog that we had never known. Uttering a curious "Yep, yep, yep!" unlike any sound he had ever been heard to make before, he sped away toward those astonished sheep, rounded them up and drove them, much too fast for their comfort, to the furthest limit of their sloping pasture, where Joy-of-Life found him, panting in tremendous excitement, holding the sheep, a woolly huddle, penned into an angle of the deep stone walls. The next morning he was off before daybreak and, after an arduous search, she found him again playing stern guardian to that same embarrassed flock. If only the Lady of Cedar Hill had offered him the lordship of a sheepfold instead of a cattle-barn, Sigurd would have been Njal to the end of his days. But Joy-of-Life, afraid that the ancestral Scotch conscience so suddenly awakened in him might not be to the liking of the Franconia farmers, decided on an immediate return to the Scarab.

Sigurd always detested train travel, and this time he barely escaped a tragedy. The baggage car was so full that to him could be allotted only a space the size of his body. Into that narrow cavity he was confined by walls of trunks that towered on every side. Within an hour of Boston an abrupt jolt threw the passengers forward in their seats. Beyond a few bumps and bruises no harm was done and Joy-of-Life speedily made her way forward through the disordered train, which had come to a standstill, to the baggage-car. Here she found a scene of disastrous confusion, trunks and valises pitched madly about, one baggageman groaning with a broken arm, on which a doctor was already busy, and the other bleeding from a cut across his forehead. For very shame she could not speak of a collie until, under the doctor's directions, she had washed and bound up that cut. It was her patient who mentioned Sigurd first.

"By George, your dog!" he said. "He's down under that tumble of trunks over there. Not a yelp from him. I'm afraid he hadn't a chance."

Brakemen had pushed in, by this time, and with ready sympathy undertook to clear a way to the corner where Sigurd had been imprisoned. A monster crate had fallen in such a way as to roof him over and, when this was dragged aside, there crouched Sigurd, showing no physical injury but utterly motionless, staring with blank eyes at his rescuers.

"Back broken," suggested one of the men.

But Joy-of-Life gave, though from pale lips, the glad, out-of-door trill that Sigurd knew so well. He quivered and, with one tremendous bound, cleared the intervening heap of baggage and reached her. She sat on a portmanteau, with her arms about him, till they arrived at Boston, and then led him down the platform and took him with her into a cab. All the time Sigurd was strange, remote, moving like a body without a spirit, unresponsive to all her attempts at comfort and cheer. But during the long wait for her missing trunk, Sigurd suddenly brightened up and tried to scrabble out of the window into the cab drawn up alongside. It was occupied by a plump, elderly couple, who gleefully pulled him in, and to them Sigurd at once began to tell, in eager whines and pitiful whimpers, that hardly needed Joy-of-Life's commentary, the story of his peril.

"Poor fellow! Poor beauty!" they crooned. "We know, we know. Our own dear collie was killed in just such a mix-up twenty years ago. Your collie knew that we would understand."

And Sigurd, restored in soul at last, licked their kind old faces and retired to his own cab. By the time he reached home, he was so completely himself again that he ate a hearty dinner and spent the better part of the evening scratching up the straw in Sigurd's House to see what treasures dogs and children might have stored there during his absence.

In the scorching July of 1913 we both left Sigurd for a year. The poor lad was so wretched with the heat that we hoped he might be less keenly aware than usual of the packing; but he knew. I do not like to remember the look in his eyes when, that last morning, he was brought up from his retreat in the cellar for good-by. I turn from that memory to his antics a few evenings earlier, when he had been out frisking with some dog callers in the comparative cool. He woofed imperiously at the screen door and, as soon as it was unlatched, dashed it open and came tearing into the study to demand of me some service that I was slow to comprehend.

"How dull you are to-night!" he grunted and, flouncing down beside me, fell clumsily to work on a hind paw. Investigating, I found a long thorn run up into the pad. It took me a minute or two to grip it and pull it out, while Sigurd, wincing a little but with full confidence in my surgery, waited as patiently as a boy when a ball game is on. When the thorn was drawn, he gave one flying lick to his foot and another to my hand—"Much obliged, but you might have been quicker about it"—and bounded back to his play with puppy eagerness.

We had made all possible arrangements for his comfort, boarding him still at his home where three of the household remained with the new tenants, but he was no longer the Lord of the Scarab. We knew that he would do his golden best and we hoped that in his own sweet wisdom he would realize that love never goes away, but as he watched and searched in vain, week after week and month after month, Sigurd drooped, and grew deaf with listening for voices over sea. Old friends took him on the short walks that sufficed him now and affectionate greetings met him everywhere on campus and on street. He would often be seen napping on one neighborly porch or another, for he dwelt more and more in the dim land of "Nod, the shepherd," consorting with

"His blind old sheep-dog, Slumber-soon."

Housewife Honey-voice gave him true and tender care, and when, on a zero night, she had to deny him the warmth of the Scarab and put him to bed, well tucked up with rugs, in Sigurd's House, she would tell him, for the strengthening of his spirit, that "even Jesus Christ slept in the straw."

For our own part, we tried not to think too much of our forsaken collie, but up in Norway we heard dogs called by his name and even on our housetop promenades in Seville we were reminded of his frolic grace by a scalawag puppy on a neighboring flat roof, a gleeful little gymnast whose joy it was to leap up and jerk the linen off the line. Sigurd's friends and ours wrote to us of his welfare with a cheerfulness that was apt to waver before the end of the paragraph.

"I met him on the campus yesterday," scribbled Nannikachee, "and when I asked him where his professors were, he galloped all over the snow, remembering you as juncos, and on second thought he reared up against an oak and barked up into its branches to scare you out of your holes, convinced that you had come to a bad end and been turned into squirrels. Such are the workings of the mighty mind you two sillies credit him with! He looked as round and yellow as a Thanksgiving pumpkin, but there was something wistful about him, too."

On the twenty-third of May, within a month of our return, Sigurd died. To all his losses had been added, that spring, the loss of College Hall, through whose familiar corridors he had roamed as usual, always seeking, one March afternoon, and which he found the next morning a desolation of blackened walls and blowing ashes. If Sigurd could have counted into the hundreds, he would have known that every girl was safe, but if he could have read in the papers of the quiet self-control with which, roused from their sleep to find the flames crackling about them, they had steadily carried through their fire-drill, formed their lines, waited for the word and gone out in perfect order, he would have been no prouder of them than he always was. Of course his Wellesley girls would behave like that.

Sigurd crowded with the rest of the college into close quarters, where he was more than ever underfoot. On that languid twenty-second of May he slept all day along the threshold of the improvised postoffice, and the hurrying feet stepped over him with unreproaching care. But with the arrival of the late afternoon mail, the postmistress, knowing the rush that was to come, said kindly to him:

"Now, Sigurd, you must really go away."

He rose slowly and moved from door to door till he came to the office of the Christian Association. Assured of Samaritan shelter here, he finished his snooze on their one rescued rug, but arrived at home in punctual time for his dinner, and that night it chanced to be the dinner Sigurd liked best. Little Esther, who had a romp with him on his arrival, said he "smiled all over when he smelt the liver cooking."

He scraped out his pan to the last crumb and then lay down in a favorite burrow of loose, cool earth for a twilight revery. One of the household, a new lover, invited him to take a stroll with her, but he excused himself with a grateful rub of his head against her knees.

He slept in Sigurd's House, as usual, and started out soon after dawn, as usual, to go for a splash in a brook not far away. An early riser, intent on making up her count of birds, met him and reported that he was trotting briskly and saluted her with "a sunny twinkle of his tail." Across the road from the brook is a pleasant old homestead under whose great trees Sigurd often took a morning nap before returning to the Scarab. Its occupants looked from the window, as they were dressing, and saw him lying at ease under a spreading evergreen. An hour later, as they rose from breakfast, they observed that Sigurd had not changed his posture and, going out to bid him good morning, found him lifeless. There was no injury on his body nor any sign of pain or struggle. He had made friends even with Death.

Did he, like the old hero Njal, "gentle and generous," foreknow his end as he chose out this quiet, beautiful spot? "We will go to our bed," said Njal in the saga, "and lay us down. I have long been eager for rest."

A grave was dug for Sigurd on the brow of Observatory Hill over which he had so often sped in the splendor of his strength, and there, under the pines, some score of his closest friends and ours gathered the following morning. With the reading of dog poems and the dropping of wild flowers they gave the still body, that was not Sigurd, back to earth. Jack pressed close to his mistress, whose Wallace sleeps near by, and whined as the box was lowered, while little Esther, beholding for the first time a burial, broke into wild crying.

In the autumn I stood by the grave, on which the one dear Sister left in The Orchard had planted violets and periwinkles from Laddie's mound, and watched a kindly young workman set above it a low granite block inscribed, "Sigurd—Our Golden Collie. 1902-1914." As I strewed the stone with goldenrod and turned away, there echoed on the air ancient words from the Greek Anthology, "Thou who passest on the path, if haply thou dost mark this monument, laugh not, I pray thee, though it is a dog's grave. Tears fell for me."

Sigurd would have been well content with the honors that his College paid him,—an obituary notice written with tenderest sympathy, a commemorative letter from his Class of 1911 and many a student elegy. It shall be his own class poet who paints the final picture:

TO JOY-OF-LIFE

II OTHER COMRADES OF THE ROAD

THE PINE GROVE PATH

ROBIN HOOD

"The little bird with the red breast, which for his great familiarity with men they call a Robin, if he meet any one on the woods to go astray, and to wander he knows not whither out of his way, of common charitie will take upon him to guide him, at least out of the woods, if he will but follow him, as some think. This I am sure of, it is a comfortable and sweet companion."

—Partheneia Sacra. By "H. A." 1533.

The early history of Robin Hood, like that of too many illustrious characters, is veiled in obscurity. I never knew his parents nor was I ever on speaking terms with any other member of his family. I cannot tell whether his nursery was set in an apple tree or elm or oak or pine, nor whether it was wind or boy or other untoward circumstance of nestling life that cast his helpless infancy adrift upon the world. Our earliest knowledge of Robin Hood dates from Sunday morning, June 16, 1901, when a group of Wellesley children, demurely wending their way to Sunday School across a bit of open green, heard chirps in the grass and picked up a baby robin, cold, hungry, bedraggled, pecked and generally forlorn. They took him to Sunday School, muffling him in a spick-and-span small handkerchief when his cries became too shrill and, after this vain attempt at spiritual comfort, gave him to one of their mammas, who, for several days, managed to sustain him on experimental diets. Thursday morning, being about to make her summer exodus, she cheerfully transferred her fosterling to me. Her farewell attention, a spoonful of milk poured down his yawning throat, nearly ended his adventures on the spot. He turned up his eyes, gasped and stiffened, but with admirable presence of mind she balanced him on his bill, gave him a dexterous tap in the crop and wiped up the milk from the table, while Robin, blinking ruefully, resigned himself to a nap in my pocket. He woke before we reached home, however, and demanded luncheon so imperiously that I called at the nearest house and begged for bread. At the drug store I paused again for water and, to make better connection between this fluid and the depths of that bright orange cavity which Robin so confidingly opened, I bought a medicine-dropper, but soon found that a finger-tip would do as well.

Owing to these attentions by the way, Robin Hood was in an agreeable and sociable frame of mind when he first met his adopted family, yet all his baby graces gained for him only a mocking reception. He was such a dumpy, speckle-breasted fluff, with funny folding legs that could not hold him up on the perch, no tail and an utterly disproportionate amount of bill, that it was impossible to take him seriously, but his trustful little heart never once suspected that we were making fun of him. He cuddled down cosily on an improvised couch in the corner of a canary cage and devoted himself to a steady alternation of snoozes and gorges. Everybody laughed at him—the Dryad, who declared him a little monster of greediness and bad manners; the chipmunks, who peered curiously into his cage whenever we left it for sun and air on the piazza; even Joy-of-Life, who promptly sallied out with a long iron spoon to dig him worms. For Robin Hood would keep on ringing his dinner-bell, so to speak, even while the moistened bits of bread were being thrust down his vociferous throat, ceasing from that hungry clamor only when he was stuffed to the point of suffocation. Then, with a ridiculous little grunt, he would topple off the supporting hand back to his trundle-bed and doze like a dormouse only to awake, in half an hour or so, an utterly famished birdling, all one yellow gape of tremulous eagerness and outcry.

At this stage of development, living to eat, and eating to sleep, Robin was left for several days in the care of Dame Gentle, kindest of neighbors, pending the absence of his foster family. Here he was petted to his babyhood's content and soon evinced a docile, affectionate disposition. He took a dislike to his cramped canary cage, but now he was strong enough to perch, and once placed on a chair rung by a hand he trusted, he would sit quiet from one feeding time to the next, or until he heard a familiar voice or step. Then, floppity-flop, down to the floor would tumble Robin and hop joyously to meet his friend. He soon had a soft, crooning little note for Dame Gentle, and all the summer long, while he became a general chatterbox, kept a peculiarly confidential accent and manner for her.

We resumed our charge on the third of July, but on the Fourth our attention was somewhat diverted from Robin by the gift of a baby vireo, apparently wounded by a fall from the nest. This green jewel, wild as a windy leaf at first, was soon tamed, but his diet proved a difficult problem. Robin Hood was only too ready to eat anything and everything, but the tiny vireo, though calling piteously for food, turned his bill away in sore disappointment from our various offerings. He would not touch the crumbs of softened bread, nor Robin's favorite mess of mashed potato and hard-boiled egg-yolk. We consulted all our bird-books, and when we learned that the case demanded "masticated insects," we sat down and looked at each other in despair. I generously offered to catch any number of insects, if Joy-of-Life would do the masticating, but little Liberty Bell finally compromised on a masticated raspberry. The next day, mocking-bird food was procured for him, and this he swallowed with apparent relish, but still he did not thrive.

On Sunday, the seventh, an eager troop of children brought to our door another fallen vireo, this wee waif seeming in worse state than the other. We named him Church Bell and cherished him as tenderly as our ignorance might, but I hope Cornelia never had half the trouble with her jewels that our pair of emeralds gave us. Their sharp, incessant, querulous pipe, the utterance of pains we could not soothe, was so trying to the nerves that, when I heard Joy-of-Life dropping books, I would transfer the nest from her desk to mine, and when Mary came up with a message from the grocer to find me spilling ink, she would take the vireos down to her ironing board and drown their plaints by her lusty voice of song. They were exquisite little creatures to see, and as trustful with us as was Robin himself, but we never had the key to their mystery. They would cry even in sleep and had hours of violent trembling. We would sometimes put them in the rough, outdoor cage which had been built for Robin, a large, square, unfloored box with roof and walls of woven wire. He looked big and lubberly beside them, like Puck beside Oberon and Titania, but he was always good-natured with his dainty guests and often tried to join in the conversation as they sat, pressed close together, on the far end of the twig which served him for a perch, lamenting like elfin Banshees. A touch of chilly weather ended their brief tragedy. Liberty Bell was hushed forever in the dawn of Tuesday, the ninth, and by Wednesday noon Church Bell lay silent beside him in the rockery which was already the burial cairn of three beloved chickens, Microbe, Pat and Cluxley.

Meanwhile Robin Hood had been causing his share of anxiety. The birdlings were all so tame that, in feeding them, we used to throw back that half of the cage-top which served as lid, whereupon they would fly up to the edge of the box and sit there in a row for dinner. Occasionally one of the vireos would flash up into a low tree and wail for food until we had to bring the step-ladder and fetch him down. But it was not until Robin's winglets were fairly grown that he seemed aware of the existence of trees. Then, suddenly, one azure afternoon, he glanced up, cocked his head, spread his untried Icarus-plumes and was off. In instant consternation, the whole family trooped after him, so far as groundlings could, while he flew from tree to tree and roof to roof. Chirping in his affectionate fashion, he peeped down upon us with evident surprise as if to ask, "Why don't you come, too? It's much nicer up here." Innocent of mirrors, he probably thought that we looked just like him, or that he looked just like us, and he could not understand why we chose to be earth-gropers when the leafy branches swayed so delectably in mid-air. But he was such a social and kindly little bird that, on our repeated calls, he came dipping down to us and, without protest of a feather, let himself be shut into his cage again.

Now we were face to face with the question that had already cast its shadow before. Should we make a life-long captive of our Robin, who took so pleasantly to human ways, or should we give him the perils and delights of liberty? Mary's eyes were very wistful, and Joy-of-Life and I reiterated to each other that our house-reared bird would be handicapped in the greenwood struggle for life, that he was necessarily weaker and less wary than other young robins, that there were white kittens next door, that a gaunt, gray hunting-cat had been seen lurking about the wire box—and yet, all the while, we knew what we must do.

And so, on the following day, whenever any of us were at leisure to guard our artless adventurer from the dangers of the yard, we set the cage-lid wide and let him go where he would. He made small use of his privileges at first. Little runs on the lawn amused him for a while, but he would soon mount to the piazza rail and tease the occupant of the steamer chair for food and petting. His hops over the shelving rock behind the house were feeble; his trips of exploration to the neighboring trees and roofs were brief. He was hardly more than a baby robin yet and, soon wearied, he would go back into his cage for a nap on the familiar perch. An old maternal robin showed much interest in this lonely, weak-legged youngster, who seemed so unthrifty about picking up ants for himself, but he squealed with fright and flew to us whenever she approached him. She would stand silently beside the cage and study him through the wire while he slept, but whether she was the matron of a robin-home for crippled children, or one of his kinsfolk puzzling out a likeness, our bewildered fosterling, whose idea of mother-birds was formed on Dame Gentle and ourselves, would have, from first to last, nothing to do with her.

But one evening, July 7th, just as we had finished giving Robin Hood a particularly good supper on the edge of his box, he suddenly soared and left us. The house stands

"About a young bird's flutter from a wood,"

and, to our dismay, Robin Hood made thitherward as if it were Sherwood Forest, disappeared among the dusky treetops and returned not a chirp to all our agitated calling. He had not passed a night out of doors for the three weeks that he had been under human guardianship, and we felt that anything from a fatal chill to a fatal hawk might befall him. But the first sound that greeted my waking senses in the morning was Mary's delighted, rich-toned, "Why, Robby!" and there, on top of his cage, sat a hungry, happy little bird, chirping eagerly and gesticulating with one wing in a funny fashion of his own, peculiar to seasons of excitement.

Mary—be it said in passing—was Cecilia's predecessor and for several years, at the outset of our housekeeping, gave us a devotion only surpassed by her devotion to her own large and lively family. They lived but a few miles away, in the Boston suburb known as Jamaica Plain, and Mary was subject to violent attacks of homesickness, especially at Christmas, Easter, Hallowe'en and Thanksgiving, so that we were usually deprived of her services when we needed them most. Once at home, she would feast and frolic until she had made herself just sick enough to have a pathetic pretext for prolonging her absence day after day. When she turned up at last, her Irish wit would inevitably forestall and frustrate any little unpleasantness that might be awaiting her. I had mentioned at table one evening, while Mary was changing the courses, that, lunching with our college president that day, I had enjoyed luscious grapefruit fresh from the West Indies, "brought her by a private hand from Jamaica." From her next truancy Mary returned with a bulging paper bag in her arms, which, even while my lips were parting to utter a deeply meditated reproach, she dumped upon me with her rosy cheeks aglow and her round blue eyes all twinkles. "Here's grapefruit for yez, brought by a private hand from Jamaica—Plain." The family, waiting about gleefully to hear me deliver that purposed scolding, broke into a shout of laughter, and the honors of the day rested, as always, with the culprit.

During one of these vacations, intolerably prolonged by excuse after excuse, our patience gave way and we availed ourselves of a sudden chance to put in her place, as temporary substitute, a highly competent (and expensive) Scandinavian woman. Thus we entered upon a month of unparalleled luxury, for Gunilla proved to be a cook of the first order. We were quite below her standard of household opulence and elegance, as we realized when she asked us, with her invariable bearing of respectful dignity, if we would kindly tell her where our wine cellar was located, but she was disposed to take a rest between great houses and provided for our simple needs with indulgent efficiency as long as her whim lasted. Although she had broiled and roasted for a governor, a bishop, and various magnates of industry, she turned to scrubbing for recreation as naturally as czars and kaisers turn to chopping wood. She beat every particle of dust, after sweeping, out of broom and whisk, and before hanging out the clothes, she scoured the line and every astonished clothespin. The sheets and other flat pieces sent home from the laundry she straightway plunged into her own tubs. Her pantry shone with obtrusive cleanliness and every dish came glistening to the stiff, high-lustered table-cloth, where her spiced breadsticks were cradled in fresh napkins for each dinner. Her kitchen range fairly dazzled the eye with its sable brightness, and we were so proud of the toothsome concoctions that came crackling and crinkling from it as to give, under her smiling encouragement, a ruinous series of banquets to our campus friends.

Promptly on Gunilla's departure, Mary came charging back to us, fired with jealous wrath. Indeed, she would talk of little else but the enormities of extravagance committed by "The Gorilla," until Robin Hood's advent effected a welcome diversion.

For the week following his first venture into the trees Robin grew braver and stronger every day. He had no feathered acquaintance and kept close at home, hopping about under the rosebushes with a comical air of proprietorship, bathing in an old flower-pot saucer in his open cage and sitting sociably, for hours at a time, on Joy-of-Life's window ledge or Mary's, or on my window box for winter birds. He could feed himself by this time, but he still liked better to be fed. His table manners showed marked improvement from his "little monster" age. He no longer guzzled, and was becoming quite capable of picking up his own living. Sometimes, when the ants were abundant, he would try the experiment of self-support for half an afternoon. He was still a very guileless birdling, and would fall sound asleep squatted down on any sunny shelf of rock or even in the middle of a path, regardless of the prowling tabbies that had already made way with our stonewall colony of chipmunks. We encouraged him to frequent his safer haunts on roof and window box by keeping fresh water and plentiful supplies of mocking bird food ready for him there, but we had to know where he was from dawn to dark, although the July dawns seemed to come in the middle of the night. Morning after morning, not daring to trust our innocent even with the early worm, I would slip on dressing-gown and slippers and be out seeking him by three or four. And there, hopping across the already heated concrete, would come skurrying an enthusiastic little speckle-breast, flapping one wing in salutation and twittering indignantly, "Morning! Breakfast! Morning! Breakfast!" as if he had been up reading the newspaper for hours. He would ride trustfully on my hand into the house, take his food and drink, and then contentedly go to sleep again, perched, by preference, on top of a door.

But one Saturday morning I called Robin Hood in vain. The air, ringing with bird-carols, held no music so precious as his hungry chirp. Joy-of-Life was now a thousand miles away, but Mary and Dame Gentle joined anxiously in the search. We were a distracted household when, at eight, a ruddy young Audubon from the hilltop arrived, bringing in one hand our overjoyed little truant, and in the other another fledgling robin, with the merest beginnings of a tail—a waif picked up by the roadside. Audubon reported that, as he was busy in his garden, a young robin had flown down and alighted at his feet, fluttered there a moment and raised the nestling cry for food. Happy Robin Hood, to have chosen from all the boys of Wellesley the one wisest in benignant woodcraft! Audubon slipped quietly to the ground, caught a caterpillar and held it out to Robin, who came fearlessly to his hand and choked the furry delicacy down. Then Audubon was sure that this was our famed fosterling and, taking up the unsuspicious little fellow, hastened to bring him down the hill to his home.

The new arrival from the greenwood, whom we dubbed Friar Tuck, promptly belied that jovial memory. He was a wild, sullen, desperate little outlaw, whose chirp was a metallic click and whose bill had to be pried open before he would eat. Not even Robin Hood's hospitable chatter could dispel his scared, defiant misery, and on the second morning, unable to bear the look he turned up to the trees, we lifted the cage lid and let him fly. We never, to our knowledge, saw Friar Tuck again, and although we often listened for his uncanny chirp, it was not heard—not even by Mary, whose imagination so expanded under these Natural History studies that she would rush upstairs several times a day to report all manner of rainbow-colored fowl that she had discovered in the thickets. By the following winter, her Celtic vision had soared beyond all bounds. "The cherubs are shoveling snow off the porch of Paradise this morning," I once happened to remark, whereat Mary, plumping down the hot coffee-pot helter-skelter, sprang open-eyed and open-mouthed to the window, gazing ecstatically up into the white whirl of the storm. "I see thim! I see thim! The shining little dears! It's using their wings for shovels they are, and I see one of their feathers afloating down in the snow."

As the summer went on, Robin Hood became the pet of the neighborhood. Even Giant Bluff, who had moods of declaring that "what with 'Biddy-Biddy' on one side, and 'Robby-Robby' on the other, this hill ain't fit for nothin' but females to live on," would bring tidbits to our Speckle, who soon saved him the trouble by making frequent calls at the front door. A guest of that house used to come to her window in the early morning and sing him "Robin Adair," while he stood on the opposite roof attentively listening, his head cocked and his bright eye turned on the serenader.

But he was a loyal little soul. He spent much of his time on Dame Gentle's piazza, and although Joy-of-Life, just before her departure, treating him for asthma—due, the sages said, to an overhearty diet in his inactive babyhood—had popped an unhappy worm dipped in red pepper down his throat, yet even this Robin could forgive. It had hurt his feelings at the time. He had withdrawn to his best-beloved branch on his best-beloved oak and maintained an offended silence for half an hour, but with the sting his anger went, and for days after Joy-of-Life's disappearance, Robin would fly up to her window ledge and chirp to the closed blinds.

During this second week of freedom, his experience was enlarged by a thunderstorm, which he contemplated with lively astonishment from within my window, but the next morning worms were plentiful, and there, to Giant Bluff's inordinate pride, was Robin trotting about the lawn like an old hand, turning up bits of turf with a grubby little bill and actually getting his own breakfast.

A day or two later our fledgling began to sow wild oats. Thursday afternoon Mary missed him and, hunting for him beyond the cairn, which she designated "The Pets' Cemetery," found him lending charmed attention to a big, red-breasted robin, who dashed off so guiltily that he bumped himself against the fence. All Friday our Speckle was shy and wild, flying about the edge of the wood with this first friend of his own feather, but he came to perch on the piazza rail at twilight, as usual, keeping us company while we took our open-air dinner, and responding to our blandishments with a drowsy chirp. When he soared to choose his slumber-spray in one of the tall trees before the house, we strained our eyes to follow him into the shadows and called up laughing counsels and good-nights as long as he would answer. But the next morning an evil-eyed black cat sat on our steps and, hour after hour, no Robin Hood appeared. Mary spent most of the forenoon in the woods and, after luncheon, we both went calling through a leafy world with a Babel of chirps about us. "Thim birds, they're just a-mocking me," wailed Mary. But suddenly we both heard, hurrying along the air, that dear, unmistakable baby squawk, and in an instant more our own little Speckle came plumping down on my head, where he rode triumphantly into the house, flapping his funny right wing all the way and gasping with speed and excitement. He had perhaps been in a fight, for one side of his guileless face was badly pecked. Throughout the afternoon he devoured one full meal after another, allowing ten-minute siesta intervals, with all the enthusiasm of a prodigal son, and then he must have a bath, and then he must be held and petted, and all the while—yep, yep, yep! flop, flop, flop!—he was trying to tell the story of his terrible adventures. Whatever they were, he was a reformed little robin, and spent the Sunday partly on my window box, where he would play for fifteen minutes together with the nutshells that the chickadees had emptied, and partly under a leafy canopy in the oak within easy squirrel-leap beyond, not having a chirp to chirp to any bad bird who would lead him into mischief.

For a fortnight longer Robin was our daily joy. It seemed to make us intimates of the woods to hear, as we were walking there, the hail of a familiar voice from overhead and look up to see our own small Speckle peeping down at us from some breezy twig against the blue. For he soon recovered from his penitence and went sailing through the trees on ever longer voyages of discovery, being often out of call for two or three hours at a time. But he was always on the window box, where no other robin ever came, in the early morning from half-past three on to seven, overflowing with conversation and insisting on intelligent replies to his remarks. At intervals throughout the day, too, I would hear a soft thud on the box, followed by a chirp-p-p and the flap-p-p of a very impatient and business-like little wing. On these occasions Robin Hood was quite too much occupied with his greenwood affairs to feed himself, and I must needs drop book or pen and cram refreshment down his importunate yellow gullet till it could hold no more. Then he would hop across to his Japanese water-cup, take a dozen eager dips, wipe his bill first on one side, then the other, on the edge of the box, and then, flapping his wing for good-by, sweep off again. In the middle of every forenoon and, during the hottest weather, of the afternoon as well, he alighted on his cage and called imperiously to Mary to bring him fresh water for his bath. We shut him in during this and during his sun-baths, since he enjoyed these rites so much as to be even more than commonly oblivious of cats.

On the evening of July 24 the mercury "dropped on us," as Mary said, some thirty degrees, and a drenching rain fell all night—a new experience for Robin Hood, who appeared at my window Thursday morning, a draggled little vagabond. Had there been no wise robin at hand to teach him how to take the oil from his back pockets and convert his airy fluff into a tight-fitting waterproof? He was glad to come in out of the wet and spent the forenoon in Mary's kitchen, letting her fondle him as she would, but flying with alarm from the proffered caresses of market-man and grocer-boy. In the course of the next few days, however, he began to protest a little when even his old friends stooped to take him up. He would hop backward, snapping his bill, but he seldom flew and, if the hand did not remain closed upon him, but left him perching free on wrist or finger, he was entirely content.

On August 8 we did our Robin wrong. An expected dinner guest had expressed a desire to see him and, as by this time he was spending his nights, presumably, in a far-off Robin roost, for which he sometimes started early in the afternoon, Mary caught him during the absorbed ecstasy of his sun-bath and shut him into the cage. This was still a favorite resort of his, and he did not object in the slightest until a young robin playmate with whom he was in the habit of flying to the roost whistled for him from a scarlet oak. Then Robin chirped to us to let him out, growing frantic with excitement as we, hitherto so prompt to obey his behests, made no move for his release. He called and called again, beating about the cage and even breaking into a song of wild entreaty. Shame-faced and conscience-stricken, we yet put him off, expecting our guest minute by minute. It was nearly seven when regrets were telephoned, but by that time Robin was in a panic and smote our hearts by the terror with which he fluttered back from us as we bent over the cage.

The instant the lid was raised he whirred up to the scarlet oak, where his faithful chum still waited, but before their belated departure Robin flew down to Dame Gentle's window and told her all about it, and then over to Giant Bluff's piazza, where he rehearsed his grievances again in a scolding chirp never heard from him before.

We closed the house on the fourteenth and went away, unforgiven by Robin Hood, who has never, so far as I know, come to human hand since Mary's clasp betrayed him to captivity. During those six days we caught flying glimpses of our estranged fosterling, easily recognized from a distance by the two white feathers in his tail, and a few times he started, by sheer force of habit, to hop across the road to us from Dame Gentle's, but, half-way over, he would turn sharply about, give an angry little yep, and hop back again.

When we reopened the house in late September, not even Dame Gentle had recent news of Robin Hood, and all the winter long we carried a sorrowful sense of broken friendship. We were anxious about our hand-reared birdling, too, hardly daring to hope that he could survive the perils of migration. What a desperate adventure it seemed!

But on the sixth day of March Robin Hood came home. There had been a baby blizzard the night before and, as we returned from college in the early afternoon, I noticed birdtracks in the light snow that still mantled the piazza rail.

"See those prints, right where Robin Hood used to sit and watch us take our supper!" I exclaimed, a wild hope knocking at my heart, but Joy-of-Life thought it a case of hungry tree sparrows and, with her especial tenderness for the plucky, one-legged fox sparrow that had consorted with them all winter, went in to find them a choice handful of scraps. But when, a few minutes later, I entered my chamber, there outside his accustomed window, on the feeding-box now drifted over with snow, sat a great, plump, glossy redbreast, staring into the room with Robin's own bright eyes and cocking his head to listen to our welcome. He fluttered back to the nearest tree, when we opened the window, indicating that he had learned a thing or two, in the gossip of the long aerial journeys, about the human race, nor did he ever again enter the house nor let us touch him, but he kept close by, for weeks, perching in his old familiar places on roof and rail and window-ledge, hopping in our walks and gamboling in our eyes. Out in the open, he would come within a few inches of us and there take his stand and chirp the confidences that we would have given all our dictionaries to comprehend. He was such a tall, stately robin, with such an imposing air of travel and experience as he stood erect, swelling his bright breast with the effort to relate his Winter's Tale, that Joy-of-Life rechristened him Lord Bobs.

In course of time our gallant fledgling appeared in company with a mate, most disappointing to our romantic anticipation,—a faded crosspatch old enough to be his grandmother, a very shrew who scolded him outrageously whenever she saw him lingering beside us. She told him we were ogres, alligators, everything that was horrible and dangerous, and threatened to peck out his last pin-feather unless he flew away from us at once. A selfish old body she was, too, monopolizing the rock-bath, as if she were taking a cure for rheumatism, whole hours at a time, while Robin Hood, hot and dusty, waited on her pleasure in the drooping branches above. But despite her shrill remonstrances, he would still visit the window box, perching on Downy Woodpecker's marrow-bone for an opera stage and trilling his matins and vespers to our delighted ears. We were as proud of Robin Hood's singing as if we had taught him ourselves. Between his carols our troubadour would take a little refreshment, trying in turn Nuthatch's lump of suet, Bluejay's rinds of cheese, Junco's crumbs and his own mocking-bird food, or quaffing rain water from Chickadee's nutshell cups. He would sometimes hop to the sill and, close against the glass, watch all the doings in that world which lay about him in his infancy. We looked forward to an hour when he might bring his own little speckles to play, as he had loved to play, with the empty nutshells, but Mrs. Robin hustled him off to the woods for the nesting season and we were never able after that first spring to distinguish him with certainty among our robin callers. None the less he had made the summer and all summers happier for us by his gracious though guarded pardon for our unkindness.

and even over wild-bird tradition and matrimonial tyranny the truth of our love for Robin Hood, its single lapse forgiven, had prevailed.

WHY THE SPIRE FELL

AN EASTER CHICK

"Only, what I feel is, that no charity at all can get rid of a certain natural unkindness which I find in things themselves."

—Pater's Marius the Epicurean.

The grippe had held me a prostrate prisoner for weeks. Books, pencils, people were forbidden. It was a strange but not unhappy Lent to lie helpless day after day, gazing through my blessed square of window into a first snowy, then blowy, often rainy and rarely sunshiny patch of woodland, watching the brown oak leaves whirl in hurricane dances above the pine-tops, and the crows wing their strong flight against the gray of the sky. As a cumberer of the earth, I was meekly grateful for the least attention from this active outdoor world, for the cheery pipings of the chickadees, whose wee black bills pounded the marrow-bone on the window-sill, for the guttural greetings of the white-breasted nuthatches who played the acrobat on the swinging, open-work bag of cracked walnuts outside the pane, even for the jeers of the bluejays who swooped to the sash and dashed off like triumphant Dick Turpins with our bounty of bread and cheese.

So Joy-of-Life, hearing of a Boston confectioner's pious offer to bestow an Easter chicken on every customer who should alleviate the fast by the purchase of two pounds of expensive candies at any time during Holy Week, thought she would add to my feathered acquaintance a more intimate companion. Herself an abominator of sweets, she heroically passed a dollar and a half across the counter and received in exchange, beside two boxes of riotous living, a tiny chick, only a day or so out from egg and incubator.

It was pretty, she said, to see the interest with which the tired shop-girls bent over that fluffy morsel of life, petting it with light touches and soothing words, as it was tucked away, with Indian meal for provender and a wad of cotton-wool for bedding, in a gay pasteboard houselet. The color of this miniature mansion was russet flecked with black. The door was a painted sham, but the red-tiled roof swung open. The window boasted four oblong apertures, and the whole establishment was symmetrically set in a half-inch estate of the reddest pasteboard clay. The girl made the roof secure with a few turns of silver cord and the captive was reduced to thrusting an indignant yellow bill through one after another of his window openings, expostulating with all creation in a series of shrill chirps. As the customer stepped out with her premium in hand, the candy-coveting group of ragamuffins outside the window surged forward in rapture at sight and sound of the chicken, and one particularly grimy urchin reached up both arms toward it with such an imploring gesture that the birdling almost changed ownership then and there. But Joy-of-Life bethought herself in time of the conditions of tenement and alley, not favorable to the development of any sort of biped, and said:

"It is for a sick lady. Don't you want her to have it?"

And the tatterdemalion slowly dropped his wistful hands, sighing dutifully, "Yes, m'm."

The chicken-bearer's dignified progress, "cheep, cheep, cheep," across the Common and Public Gardens and through the Back Bay section, afforded her a new gauge for testing human nature. Colonial Dames who looked an aristocratic rebuke she put lower in the scale of sympathy than the Italian organ-grinder whose black eyes laughed frankly into hers, while the maid who opened a door in Newbury street, where Joy-of-Life had a call to make, fell with her shocked, contemptuous stare quite under passing rank.

It was late in the evening before I heard upon the stairs a welcome tread, mounting to that queer accompaniment of cheep, cheep, cheep, now pitched upon a key, had we but ears to hear, of acute distress. My delight in greeting the chicken was not reciprocated, and no wonder. Our unconscious, ignorant crimes against his frail little being had already begun. Joy-of-Life, ever most tender toward the weak, enjoyed, moreover, the advantage of having been reared upon a farm, where she had often watched the life of coop and poultry-yard, but not even she was wise enough to give that chicken comfort.