with us and joined us on the walk, Sigurd, always of courteous
instinct, would drop back and follow demurely, or amuse himself at a
decorous distance by investigating holes, chasing squirrels and
striving with wild springs, scrambles, clawings, to climb the trees
from whose boughs they mocked his clumsy efforts. But how rejoiced he
would be when the interloper turned off! "There! Gone at last! Now we
_will_ have fun, all by ourselves!" Then he would cast about for some
doughty deed to do, longing to dazzle us by a prodigious feat of
strength and skill. If he could find a young tree that our too
efficient forestry had cut down he would drag it along, bite and break
away its branches, seize it by the middle and balance it in his mouth
as a long pole, constantly lifting his bright eyes to us for
admiration.

Once arrived at the lake, it was our duty to find sticks and fling them
out over the water to the extent of our strength, while Sigurd swam for
them, the farther the better. As he would gallantly splash up from the
shallows and, stick in mouth, climb the bushy bank, we had to run from
the mighty shaking with which, delivering the prize, he loved to give
us a shower-bath. After a few such plunges, Sigurd, while we rested on
the bank, would appropriate the green apron of Mother Earth for a
towel, rolling over and over on the turf to dry himself and completing
the process by scampers in the sun. He disliked being wet, for although
these swims in the lake ranked among his prime delights, at home he
always resented and resisted a bath and, on a showery day, would often
run in to the towel rack, pleading to be wiped dry, and would then
forthwith run out into the rain again. In our hottest weather he would
slip off alone in the early morning to that still lake all sweet with
water-lilies and would be gone for hours. A few times, in his younger
years, our anxiety took us by mid-day to the shore, whence we would see
a yellow head well out in the water. At our whistle, Sigurd would turn
and swim back to us with an air of surprise and pleasure as if he had
quite forgotten that such dear friends were to be found on land. The
outcome was not so happy when, tormented in his fur coat by the heat,
he had stolen off to one of his secret mire-pits and indulged in a cool
wallow. When he came home plastered and perfumed from head to tail, we
would greet him with exclamations of disgust, which brought the Byronic
melancholy into his eyes,