d would rouse
himself, trot across to the fireplace, select from the basket a piece
of light kindling wood, and present it with the clear intimation that
it would be more true to love to cheer up Sigurd with a bit of play
than to lose the hour in grieving.

Rarely in his joyful life, and then but for a matter of days or weeks,
had we both been away from Sigurd. He hated to have either of us go. He
knew only too well the meaning of trunks and suitcases and always
stalked uneasily about the room, getting in the way as much as
possible, during the process of packing. When at last he saw these
objects of ill omen closed and carried downstairs, followed by one of
his mistresses in traveling garb, he would desperately take his stand
in the doorway and, planting his legs like principles, do his best to
bar her exit. For a few days he would be very restless, watchful,
anxious, keeping close to the mistress who stayed behind to question
her with troubled looks and entreat her not to abandon Sigurd; nor was
the missing all on his side. The summer of 1908 was so hot that our
gasping collie would tease his friends to fan him and, for the first
and only time, we had him shaved. His bright hair, duly cleansed, was
made up with corn-colored silk into a sofa-pillow and sent to
Joy-of-Life, then sojourning in strange places, now among the Mormons,
now on an Indian reservation, gathering material for her two vivid
volumes on the _Economic Beginnings of the Far West_; and she assured
him that his "yellow bunch of love" was a magical cure for a certain
ache beyond the ken of the doctors. But grievously abashed he was with
only the white waves of his ruff, his fore-pantalets and plumy tail
unprofaned by the shears, and his sufferings from mortification and
mosquitoes outwent all that he had endured from the heat. As his silky
under-vest grew long enough to curl, he reminded us of Cagnotte, the
supposed poodle bought for three-year-old Gautier by his nurse, on whom
the Paris dealers palmed off a cur sewed up in a jacket of lamb's wool.

On summer vacations our Volsung sometimes went up into New Hampshire
with one or both of us. He especially rejoiced in our cottage life on
Twin Lake, where Sigurd renewed his youth, pursuing

"the swallows o'er the meads
With scarce a slower flight."

Here he learned to scratch up his own bed in the pine needles and to
wash his stick at the edge of the lake after a game, though we neve