nder, somewhere among the long grass of the
salt-marsh, that borders our garden, and in perigee tides widens out
into a lake. There indeed would be his appropriate country, for there
was the happy hunting-ground through which in life he was never tired of
roaming, in the inextinguishable hope of mink, and with the occasional
certainty of a water-rat.

He had come to us almost as mysteriously as he went away; a fox-terrier
puppy wandered out of the Infinite to the neighbourhood of our ice-box,
one November morning, and now wandered back again. Technically, he was
just graduating out of puppyhood, though, like the most charming human
beings, he never really grew up, and remained, in behaviour and
imagination, a puppy to the end. He was a dog of good breed and good
manners, evidently with gentlemanly antecedents canine and human. There
were those more learned in canine aristocracy than ourselves who said
that his large leaf-like, but very becoming, ears meant a bar sinister
somewhere in his pedigree, but to our eyes those only made him
better-looking; and, for the rest of him, he was race--race nervous,
sensitive, refined, and courageous--from the point of his all-searching
nose to the end of his stub of a tail, which the conventional docking
had seemed but to make the more expressive. We had already one dog in
the family when he arrived, and two Maltese cats. With the cats he was
never able to make friends, in spite of persistent well-intentioned
efforts. It was evident to us that his advances were all made in the
spirit of play, and from a desire of comradeship, the two crowning needs
of his blithe sociable spirit. But the cats received them in an attitude
of invincible distrust, of which his poor nose frequently bore the sorry
signature. Yet they had become friendly enough with the other dog, an
elderly setter, by name Teddy, whose calm, lordly, slow-moving ways were
due to a combination of natural dignity, vast experience of life, and
some rheumatism. As Teddy would sit philosophizing by the hearth of an
evening, immovable and plunged in memories, yet alert on the instant to
a footfall a quarter of a mile away, they would rub their sinuous
smoke-grey bodies to and fro beneath his jaws, just as though he were a
piece of furniture; and he would take as little notice of them as though
he were the leg of the piano; though sometimes he would wag his tail
gently to and fro, or rap it softly on the floor, as though appreciatin