r of lameness. And then, for
the first time, a steady change that had been so slow as to escape any
one's notice dawned upon the Mistress and the Master. It struck them
both at the same moment. And they stared dully at their pet.

The shapeless, bumptious, foolish Pest of two months ago had vanished.
In his place, by a very normal process of nature-magic, stood a
magnificently stately thoroughbred collie.

The big head had tapered symmetrically, and had lost its puppy
formlessness. It was now a head worthy of Landseer's own pencil. The
bonily awkward body had lengthened and had lost its myriad knobs and
angles. It had grown massively graceful.

The former thatch of half-curly and indeterminately yellowish fuzz had
changed to a rough tawny coat, wavy and unbelievably heavy, stippled at
the ends with glossy black. There was a strange depth and repose and
Soul in the dark eyes--yes, and a keen intelligence, too.

It was the old story of the Ugly Duckling, all over again.

"Why!" gasped the Mistress. "He's--he's BEAUTIFUL! And I never knew it."

At her loved voice the great dog moved across to where she sat. Lightly
he laid one little white paw on her knee and looked gravely up into her
eyes.

"He's got sense, too," chimed in the Master. "Look at those eyes, if
you doubt it. They're alive with intelligence. It's--it's a miracle! He
can't be the same worthless whelp I wanted to get rid of! He CAN'T!"

And he was not. The long illness, at the most formative time of the
dog's growth, had done its work in developing what, all the time, had
lain latent. The same illness--and the long-enforced personal touch
with humans--had done an equally transforming work on the puppy's
undeveloped mind. The Thackeray-Washington-Lincoln-Bismarck simile had
held good.

What looked like a miracle was no more than the same beautifully simple
process which Nature enacts every day, when she changes an awkward and
dirt-colored cygnet into a glorious swan or a leggily gawky colt into a
superb Derby-winner. But Bruce's metamorphosis seemed none the less
wonderful in the eyes of the two people who had learned to love him.

Somewhere in the hideous wreck of Dr. Halding's motorcar the dog had
found a soul--and the rest had followed as a natural course of growth.

At the autumn dog-show, in Hampton, a "dark-sable-and-white" collie of
unwonted size and beauty walked proudly into the ring close to the
Mistress's side, when the puppy class was ca