being full of strange, sinister objects,
for to Hamlet, even yet, the unknown is a menace and a dread. Brought
into study or dining-room, he would "wax desperate with imagination,"
throwing wild looks at ceiling and walls and then spinning about and
about like an agonized top. "Upon the heat and flame" of those
excitements it was hard to persuade him to "sprinkle cool patience,"
but in process of time he became accustomed to rugs and furniture and
even, after repeated assurances, grew to understand that Sigurd's chair
was at his service.

By mid-winter he had come to realize, with a touching relief and
responsive fervor of affection, that the members of the family were his
friends, but he was still thrown into a panic by the door-bell and the
murderous monsters whose entrance he believed it to announce. Every
arrival he regarded as an agent of Hamlet's doom and fled precipitately
to chosen places of concealment on the upper floors. Yet curiosity was
strong in the little fellow, too. As I sat chatting with a caller, I
would presently be aware of an excessively unobtrusive collie stealing
down the stairs. Quivering all over, in awe of his own daring, he would
place himself erect on the threshold with his face to the hall and very
slowly, inch by inch, would "like a crab" back into the room, edging
along on his haunches, steering his blind course for the further side
of my chair. Still keeping his back to the stranger, he would reach up
a pleading paw for me to clasp and then, regarding himself as both
invisible and protected, listen keenly to learn if the conversation
were by any chance about Hamlet.

He was as timorous out of doors as in, having little to do with other
dogs, save with a benignant collie neighbor, old Betty, and yielding up
his choicest bones without remonstrance to any impudent marauder. If I
reproached him for his pacifist bearing, he would touch my hand with an
apologetic tongue and look up with shamefaced eyes that admitted:

"it cannot be
But I am pigeon-liver'd, and lack gall
To make oppression bitter."

It was his habit to take legs, rather than arms, "against a sea of
troubles," and when enemies loomed on the horizon he would
precipitately make for home. He was by this time dog enough to be
overjoyed if one of us summoned him for a walk.

"What noise? who calls on Hamlet?"

And all his belated frolic of puppyhood came out in impatient collie
capers while,