within a week to an ignominious death. To
his dying day, the Prince ever afterwards kept a spaniel of the same
race in his bed-chamber."

And well he might, and well, too, did the sculptors place a little dog
of marble or bronze at the feet of his royal statues hardly more silent
than himself, but what Sigurd and I clamored to know was whether, on
that wild night of September eleventh, 1572, the spaniel escaped with
his master or died with the servants and secretaries on Spanish steel,
and no historian, not even our own, could tell us. With the ancient
guile of teachers she would divert our attention from the question she
could not answer by relating something else,--how Denmark commemorates
a dog true to a deposed king in a high order of nobility whose motto
runs, _Wild-brat was faithful_. Or she would take down the first volume
of her well-worn _Heimskringla_ and excite Sigurd's young ambition by
the record of King Saur. For when Eyestein, King of the Uplands, had
harried Thrandheim and set his son over them, and they had slain the
son, then "King Eyestein fared a-warring the second time into
Thrandheim, and harried wide there, and laid folk under him. Then he
bade the Thrandheimers choose whether they would have for king his
thrall, who was called Thorir Faxi, or his hound, who was called Saur;
and they chose the second, deeming they would then the rather do their
own will. Then let they bewitch into the hound the wisdom of three men,
and he barked two words and spake the third. A collar was wrought for
him, and chains of gold and silver; and whenso the ways were miry, his
courtmen bare him on their shoulders. A high-seat was dight for him,
and he sat on howe as kings do; he dwelt at the Inner Isle, and had his
abode at the stead called Saur's Howe. And so say folk that he came to
his death in this wise, that the wolves fell on his flocks and herds,
and his courtmen egged him on to defend his sheep; so he leaped down
from his howe, and went to meet the wolves, but they straightway tore
him asunder."

On the whole, Sigurd preferred poetry, whose rhythm promptly put him to
sleep. It was all one to him whether Homer sang the joy-broken heart of
old Argus, over whom

"the black night of death
Came suddenly, as soon as he had seen
Ulysses, absent now for twenty years,"

or Virgil chanted the device whereby AEneas and the Sibyl baffled the
giant watch-dog of Hades.

"The three-mouthed ba