thrust upon him by the
grandmother of the spaniel family, rested content with his unacademic
tutor.

"Poor Ellen," as she invariably called herself, was a small, wiry,
nut-brown Irish woman, whose gray hair rose erect, as if just
affrighted by pouke or pixy, from above a constantly wrinkling forehead
and a pair of snapping jet eyes. She must have been on the borders of
insanity, if not across, when she came to us. She was a furious worker,
cycloning about the house with mop and broom at all hours and not
hesitating to upbraid the college president herself, most benign and
punctilious of ladies, if her boots brought one speck of mud into "Poor
Ellen's clane hall." Her chief pride, however, was in her frugality, as
we discovered to our dismay on her second afternoon, when, as it often
happily chanced, the Dryad, then living on the campus, dropped in for a
call and consented to remain for dinner.

It was a simple matter, in our informal way of life, to call back from
the piazza through the hall to the figure setting the table in the
dining room:

"Lay another plate, please, Ellen. Our friend stays to dine with us."

But the wail that succeeded nearly slew our friend by throwing her into
an agony of suppressed laughter.

"Mother of God! Isn't that the burning shame! And me maning the three
chops should do us all!"

Ellen had been with us but a few days, though the house was already so
scoured and polished that we scarcely dared set foot on our own floors,
when a prolonged season of sultry weather broke in a tremendous
thunderstorm. These thunderstorms were always a challenge to Sigurd's
valor. At the first crash he would pluckily make for the porch, where,
flinging up his head, he would cast back one defiant bark to that
Superdog in the skies; then, scared by his own audacity, he would
usually bolt upstairs and take refuge under a bed. But this time he
fled, with the second shattering peal, to Ellen, who was rocking
herself, a crouching, huddled figure, to and fro on the cellar stairs,
screaming in a weird, blood-curdling chant:

"Mercy of God! Poor Ellen belaves in God the Father and in the Holy
Mother of God and in all the blissid saints of heaven. Oh, grace of
Mary! Poor Ellen belaves in thim all. Good Lord, you never kilt Poor
Ellen yet and you wouldn't be after doing it now whin her bones be old
and her heart a nest of sorrows. The Lord look down in pity on the
poor."

With Sigurd hugged tight, Ellen's shri