o bits, and either Joy-of-Life or I had to hold him tight,
while the other passed the cookies and candies for which our
supernatural visitants had come.

May Day was better fun for Sigurd. He quickly understood that the
Maybasket chase was only a game and played it with a vim. But in
general he did not care for festivals nor for any variation of the
usual round. Just everyday living was joy enough for him. If Sigurd had
made the calendar, the week would have been all Mondays. Even Christmas
puzzled more than it pleased him. Such a confusion of brown paper and
tissue paper, such a flourishing of queer, lumpy stockings, such
tangles of string, such excitement over objects that had no thrill for
his inquiring nose! And for himself, the rubber cats with gruesome
squeaks inside them, the mechanical beetles that shook his courage as
they charged at him across the floor! He could not make it out. Once
when all the people present were shouting with mirth over a new,
preposterous game of cards, Sigurd quietly picked up from under the
table a pack not yet called into service and carried it out into the
kitchen, where he was presently discovered with one forefoot set on the
cards tumbled about before him, while he gazed dejectedly down at them
in a defeated effort to find out why they were amusing. And the
Christmas parties, for which he had to be scrubbed until he shone like
an image of white and gold! And if it happened that, between his toilet
and the party, he whizzed off with Laddie, what unpleasantness on his
return!

"Sigurd was especially invited for to-night and I promised Wallace to
bring him. But he's too dirty now and he hasn't had his dinner."

"All his own doing. He shall come dirty and dinnerless and learn to be
ashamed of himself."

Not that he felt ashamed at all, but very tired and lame, hobbling
behind his family into a bright, chattering room, where everybody
wanted to pet him and where all he wanted was to be let alone to sleep
his frolic off. Why must he be waked up with foolish laughter because
that glittering tree, which he had not been allowed to investigate for
squirrels, had given, in his name, a toy ship to Wallace, whose father,
Professor Wit, must needs observe: "How like dear Sigurd, to present
his neighbors with his _barque_!" And though for him the Christmas
tree bore a chocolate caramel in the inmost box of a nest of boxes, he
would, to the disappointment of the company who had heard of his sk