with our intolerable human tardiness, wraps were donned
and doors thrown open. And then the leaps of ecstasy!

"Go on; I'll follow thee."

But he hated, and still hates, to be out in the great, dangerous world
of noises, people, motors, alone by daylight. "Nay, come, let's go
together," is his constant plea. But if no one of the household is at
liberty to companion him, he prefers to wait for his exercise till "the
very witching time of night," when he plunges into the mystery of the
woods or runs by moonlight along deserted roads. During his first
winter, on returning from one of his nocturnal rambles, he would stand,
snow-coated, without a whine or scratch, shivering at the outside door,
silent even under the beating of an icy storm, until some anxious
watcher caught sight of him and let him in. He had been with us over a
year before he found his voice. Then, one noon, a brisk step coming up
to the south porch along our private path took Hamlet by surprise. His
quick, shrill protest astonished him as much as it did us and he
promptly rushed to refuge under the table. But having shattered our
psychopathic theories and confessed that he was no mute, he took to
barking with immoderate enthusiasm that has already more than made up
for lost time. Yet as with his movements, so his barking is
odd,--discordant, off the pitch, "jangled out of tune."

These tremendous bouts of barking, combined with his excitable and
suspicious temperament, have given our timid collie a preposterous
reputation for ferocity. Callers wise in dogs observe that even as he
roars he runs away, wagging his tail, and come boldly on to the north
door, while Hamlet announces and denounces them at the south:

"O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain!"
"A guilty thing."
"A puff'd and reckless libertine."
"A pestilence on him for a mad rogue!"
"What, ho! help, help, help!"

But when he has torn his "passion to tatters, to very rags," he slips
in shyly to greet the accepted caller, usually seating himself,
according to his own peculiar code of etiquette, with his back to the
guest, but sometimes, especially if it is a college girl "in the morn
and liquid dew of youth," he will, instead of taking his accustomed
place by me, lie down at Ophelia's feet, explaining:

"Here's metal more attractive."

Hamlet is a delicate subject for discipline as any sign of displeasure
on the part of the few he trusts will fling him back