th in its own careless beauty, but never a man stepped on the
place, brother or guest or gardener or state warden or whosoever, but,
driven by the deep instinct of the pioneer, he must needs go stealthily
forth with ax or saw or shears and lay about him in our happy tangle.
The worst of it was that we had to appear grateful.

Sigurd accepted his new abode with but a passing bewilderment. Racing
up from the train on his return from a summer in the mountains with
Joy-of-Life, he was whistled into the Scarab while yet too utterly
absorbed in the rapture of his greetings to heed where he was. After a
little he looked about him in obvious surprise and perplexity and set
out at once on a tour of investigation, trotting from cellar to attic,
nosing into the closets and under the shelves, sniffing at the familiar
desks and bookcases and recognizing with a wag his own chair and rug.
As soon as might be he was out of doors, examining porches and paths.
Then he crossed the intervening bit of wilderness, granite ledge matted
over with the red-berried kinnikinic, and woofed for admittance at his
accustomed door. He was kindly received and allowed to go about as he
liked, upstairs and downstairs and into my lord's chamber, but the
furniture was not his furniture, the smells were not his smells, and
within ten minutes he had quitted those rooms, scene of so many puppy
exploits, to enter them no more. He knew the difference between house
and home.

Yet our new holding did not seem to Sigurd nor to us entirely natural
until he had cut one of his unfortunate paws on a broken bottle left by
the carpenters as a souvenir and had strewn steps and driveway and lawn
with shreds of cotton bandages and adhesive plaster. "When is a clutter
not a clutter?" asked my mother, and answered her own conundrum: "When
Sigurd does it."

In a snug corner against the south wall of the Scarab stood a massive
and elegant erection, with gable roof and olive-green door, that only
the unsophisticated called a kennel. It was "Sigurd's House," and as
such he accepted it, counting its artistically shingled walls and heavy
layers of sheathing paper no more than his just deserts. He delighted
in its deep bed of fresh straw which tickled him most agreeably as he
rolled over and over in it. He found it an exciting by-play, too, to
dash in with stick or bone and lose it under his bedding, which he
would proceed to scratch up with all the fury of a New England matron
i