ng a world of mysterious and infinite adventure, flattened
contritely in the midst of his enormities.

"How human!" was her only comment.

Often they came back injured, with bitten ears, scratched faces,
bleeding feet, and pretended to be worse off than they were, so as to
divert our reproaches into pity. Sigurd limped home one dawn with a
cruelly torn claw and lay all day in a round clothes-basket, to which
he had taken a fancy, curled up like a yellow caterpillar and sleeping
like a dormouse. But when I was sitting on the piazza steps that
evening, putting a fresh bandage on the claw, while Sigurd, almost too
feeble to stir, watched the process with pathetic eyes, a blanched
sprite glistened by, only a white motion through the dark, and in an
instant the invalid had sped away, bandage trailing, to be wicked all
over again.

No matter how often the four mistresses agreed that discipline required
doors to be shut against the truants till daybreak, on these nights of
their escapes ours were light slumbers that a pleading whine too easily
broke and many were the tiptoe journeys down derisively creaking stairs
to let the wanderers in. The next day such lame, dirty, subdued,
meek-minded stay-at-homes as our collies were! It was hard to scold
them properly when they rolled over on their backs and presented aching
stomachs to be comforted. But sometimes these stampedes took place by
day, for whenever they met out-of-doors these brothers, otherwise
fairly obedient, would disregard all human commands for the
authoritative call of the blood and dart away side by side like arrows
shot from a single bow. The sins that neither would commit alone they
reveled in without scruple when they were together. From all over town
we heard of our paragons as chasing cats, jumping at horses' heads,
over-running gardens and upsetting children. One sedate young woman on
whom they leaped, entreating her to play with them, sent in a
substantial bill to "the owner of the dog that tore my dress." When we
inquired whether it was the golden collie or the white that did the
damage she coldly replied that "the animals were so mixed up" she
couldn't tell whether it was "the brown one or the drab,"--to such a
condition had a bath of mud brought our dandies. One mother sternly
confronted us with a weepy little boy who complained that "zem two dogs
made me frow sticks for 'em all the way home from school an' my arm's
most bwoke with tiredness."

I reme