llowed only to sniff and nibble.

We may have noticed that Sigurd's girth was ampler and his bearing more
sedate than in his younger days, but still he was the first in every
frolic and almost as fleet as a deer. He roused one at the edge of the
woods one morning when he was out for an early airing with Joy-of-Life
and chased it across the meadows so fast and far that she was in dismay
lest he overtake the beautiful creature and pull it down. Even to the
last he would let no dog pass him. His frankest admirer and
fellow-runner through his sunset years was a simple-minded young collie
whom Sigurd would outwit by wheeling sharply, when he felt Sandy
gaining on him, and making off at right angles while the precipitate
pursuer sped on for some distance in the old direction. But the goal
was what Sigurd chose to make it, and Sandy, bewildered by these subtle
tactics, always believed himself outrun.

We had come to regard a walk without Sigurd as hardly a walk at all.
Perhaps we observed that he found the heat, which brought out his
tormenting eczema, a little harder to bear from summer to summer, but
our crisp, crackling winters revived him to all manner of puppy antics.
I remember, like a picture, one frosty afternoon, the evergreens
festooned with ice, while the leafless trees, struck by the level rays
of the western sun, glistened with rainbow crystals. Through this
enchanted world, as through the heart of a diamond, Joy-of-Life and
Sigurd were coming home. Sigurd, barking his glad music, was bounding
hither and thither over the sparkling crust, now trying to fulfill his
contract to keep all chickadees and nut-hatches, blue jays and juncos,
from alighting on the earth, and now convinced that at last the moment
had come when he was to realize his supreme ambition, inherited from
Ralph, and catch a crow. Their sardonic caws above his head, as they
flapped heavily from pine to pine, made him so furious that he would
pounce on their black, sliding shadows, while Joy-of-Life, her cheeks
apple-bright with the cold, laughed at him so merrily that he took it
for applause.

Yet change was busy about our collie, who welcomed no changes but loved
his world exactly as it was. We sold the first home and moved into a
more spacious one that we had built on a strip of untamed land hard by.
Then a street came, and more houses, and quietly the wildwood drew away
from us. Within our own bounds, at least, we strove to keep the forest
grow