r bleeding from a cut across his forehead. For very shame she could
not speak of a collie until, under the doctor's directions, she had
washed and bound up that cut. It was her patient who mentioned Sigurd
first.

"By George, your dog!" he said. "He's down under that tumble of trunks
over there. Not a yelp from him. I'm afraid he hadn't a chance."

Brakemen had pushed in, by this time, and with ready sympathy undertook
to clear a way to the corner where Sigurd had been imprisoned. A
monster crate had fallen in such a way as to roof him over and, when
this was dragged aside, there crouched Sigurd, showing no physical
injury but utterly motionless, staring with blank eyes at his rescuers.

"Back broken," suggested one of the men.

But Joy-of-Life gave, though from pale lips, the glad, out-of-door
trill that Sigurd knew so well. He quivered and, with one tremendous
bound, cleared the intervening heap of baggage and reached her. She sat
on a portmanteau, with her arms about him, till they arrived at Boston,
and then led him down the platform and took him with her into a cab.
All the time Sigurd was strange, remote, moving like a body without a
spirit, unresponsive to all her attempts at comfort and cheer. But
during the long wait for her missing trunk, Sigurd suddenly brightened
up and tried to scrabble out of the window into the cab drawn up
alongside. It was occupied by a plump, elderly couple, who gleefully
pulled him in, and to them Sigurd at once began to tell, in eager
whines and pitiful whimpers, that hardly needed Joy-of-Life's
commentary, the story of his peril.

"Poor fellow! Poor beauty!" they crooned. "We know, we know. Our own
dear collie was killed in just such a mix-up twenty years ago. Your
collie knew that we would understand."

And Sigurd, restored in soul at last, licked their kind old faces and
retired to his own cab. By the time he reached home, he was so
completely himself again that he ate a hearty dinner and spent the
better part of the evening scratching up the straw in Sigurd's House to
see what treasures dogs and children might have stored there during his
absence.

In the scorching July of 1913 we both left Sigurd for a year. The poor
lad was so wretched with the heat that we hoped he might be less keenly
aware than usual of the packing; but he knew. I do not like to remember
the look in his eyes when, that last morning, he was brought up from
his retreat in the cellar for good-by. I turn