d with a slow death by
torture; at other times bursting into a hilarious laugh as he held
forth on the predicament of Mahtawa, when that wily chief was treed
by Crusoe in the prairie. Young Marston was there, too, hanging about
Dick, whom he loved as a brother and regarded as a perfect hero.
Grumps, too, was there, and Fan. Do you think, reader, that Grumps
looked at any one but Crusoe? If you do, you are mistaken. Grumps
on that day became a regular, an incorrigible, utter, and perfect
nuisance to everybody--not excepting himself, poor beast! Grumps was
a dog of one idea, and that idea was Crusoe. Out of that great idea
there grew one little secondary idea, and that idea was that the only
joy on earth worth mentioning was to sit on his haunches, exactly
six inches from Crusoe's nose, and gaze steadfastly into his face.
Wherever Crusoe went Grumps went. If Crusoe stopped, Grumps was
down before him in an instant. If Crusoe bounded away, which in the
exuberance of his spirits he often did, Grumps was after him like a
bundle of mad hair. He was in everybody's way, in Crusoe's way, and
being, so to speak, "beside himself," was also in his own way. If
people trod upon him accidentally, which they often did, Grumps
uttered a solitary heart-rending yell proportioned in intensity to the
excruciating nature of the torture he endured, then instantly resumed
his position and his fascinated stare. Crusoe generally held his head
up, and gazed over his little friend at what was going on around him;
but if for a moment he permitted his eye to rest on the countenance of
Grumps, that creature's tail became suddenly imbued with an amount of
wriggling vitality that seemed to threaten its separation from the
body.

It was really quite interesting to watch this unblushing, and
disinterested, and utterly reckless display of affection on the part
of Grumps, and the amiable way in which Crusoe put up with it. We
say put up with it advisedly, because it must have been a very great
inconvenience to him, seeing that if he attempted to move, his
satellite moved in front of him, so that his only way of escaping
temporarily was by jumping over Grumps's head.

Grumps was everywhere all day. Nobody, almost, escaped trampling on
part of him. He tumbled over everything, into everything, and against
everything. He knocked himself, singed himself, and scalded himself,
and in fact forgot himself altogether; and when, late that night,
Crusoe went with D