hustle him off to the rocks behind the house,
fling pailfuls of warm water over him and do our best to scrape off his
pollutions. On one of these occasions, a college-girl lover and Wallace
raced him up to Waban and scrubbed and rinsed him until, so they said,
the entire lake had changed color.

In the autumn term Sigurd would take a special course in harvesting,
frisking through a neighboring orchard and playing ball with the
falling apples. The winter term he gave mainly to athletics and
dramatics. How bewildered he was that first snowy morning when he ran
out into a strange white ravine bounded by slippery walls and when,
desperately lunging over one of these, he felt himself floundering in a
drift! His first dubious venture on a crackling sheet of ice taxed his
puppy courage, too, but he persisted in his quivering progress across
our little Longfellow Pond and swaggered up the further side with his
jauntiest sporting air. In later years he enjoyed nothing better than
going skating with Lady Blanche, another member of our changeful
household, and on a stinging January morning he would outdo the
frolics, that Cowper smiled to watch, of the dog who

"with many a frisk
Wide scampering, snatches up the drifted snow
With ivory teeth, or ploughs it with his snout;
Then shakes his powder'd coat, and barks for joy."

As for dramatics, Sigurd loved to thrust his stick deep into a pile of
russet leaves or sparkling snow, and then pretend that he was a
sanguinary monster whose prey had escaped him, and dig and nose and
scrape and scatter and tear and shuffle with frenzied energy, rumbling
all the while growls of awful menace, until he had tossed it up to
seize and worry, display to the audience always requisite for these
performances, and then bury it again for a repetition of the melodrama.

When the winter storms kept him in, his surging vitality made him as
restless as an imprisoned wind. If the Cave of AEolus boasted a
housekeeper, she had our sympathy. All day long Sigurd would scoot and
spin about the little range of rooms that we liked to have quiet and
orderly, a very electric battery of mischief. He would pick quarrels
with the rugs, scatter the pile of newspapers and dance a scandalous
jig with that elderly, respectable Bostonian, _The Transcript_. He
would bump into a gracefully leaning broom and a meditative mop,
knocking their wooden wits together and bringing them t