tall as we took him out to walk on
his latest leash. He submitted to this needless indignity as he
submitted to the long chain that bound him to the piazza railing, with
magnanimous forbearance. We had used a rope at first, but he felt it a
point of honor to gnaw this apart, coming cheerfully to meet us with a
section of our clothesline trailing from his collar. Through these
first weeks he had much to occupy his mind and tax his fortitude in the
engine whistles and rumble of trains, the whirr of electric cars,
Cecilia's energetic broom that threatened to brush him off the piazza,
the manners of the market-man, who, unlearned in Norse mythology,
injuriously called him Jigger, and divers other perils and excitements.
His ears were forever on the cock and his tail busy with the agitated
utterance of his changing emotions. When we ventured, after a little,
to let him run loose, he investigated the immediate territory but kept
within call, bounding to meet us as we came out to look for him. The
first time that he actually ventured off on an independent quest, he
came tearing back after forty minutes' absence as if he had been
putting a girdle round the earth, insisting on a complete and repeated
family welcome as well as a second breakfast. My first vivid sense of
the comfort of having a dog smote me on the edge of a tired evening,
when, trudging home from a long day in one of the Boston libraries, a
sudden nose was thrust into my hand and a gleaming shape leapt up out
of the roadside shadows in jubilant welcome. So we supposed our collie
was light-hearted.

But one after-sunset hour, when we had feloniously sallied out to strip
the flower-beds of an absent neighbor, Sigurd, in amiable attendance,
suddenly started, wheeled and was off down the hill like a shimmering
arrow of Apollo. How was he aware of her at that distance, in that
dusk, the Lady of Cedar Hill? He flung himself like a happy avalanche
upon her and poured out all the bewilderment and yearning, the
lonesomeness and love of his loyal soul, in a shrill, ecstatic tremolo
that we came to designate as "Sigurd's lyric cry." It was reserved for
a favored few, objects of romantic devotion; it was rarely vouchsafed
to the commonplace members of his own household; but it never failed
the Lady of Cedar Hill, though months might elapse between her visits.

On this her first coming, his joy was touching to see. He pressed close
to her side as she walked up the hill and a