arm-chair. A heavy body
flopped on the carpet. Out into the room, heaving himself along as
though sleep had stiffened his joints, and breathing stertorously
through his tilted nose, moved the fine bulldog. Seen in the open, he
looked even more formidable than he had done in his basket.

"Guard him, Percy! Good dog, guard him! Oh, heavens! What's the matter
with him?"

And with these words the emotional woman, uttering a wail of anguish,
flung herself on the floor beside the animal.

Percy was, indeed, in manifestly bad shape. He seemed quite unable to
drag his limbs across the room. There was a curious arch in his back,
and, as his mistress touched him, he cried out plaintively,

"Percy! Oh, what IS the matter with him? His nose is burning!"

Now was the time, with both sections of the enemy's forces occupied, for
Archie to have departed softly from the room. But never, since the
day when at the age of eleven he had carried a large, damp, and muddy
terrier with a sore foot three miles and deposited him on the best sofa
in his mother's drawing-room, had he been able to ignore the spectacle
of a dog in trouble.

"He does look bad, what!"

"He's dying! Oh, he's dying! Is it distemper? He's never had distemper."

Archie regarded the sufferer with the grave eye of the expert. He shook
his head.

"It's not that," he said. "Dogs with distemper make a sort of snifting
noise."

"But he IS making a snifting noise!"

"No, he's making a snuffling noise. Great difference between snuffling
and snifting. Not the same thing at all. I mean to say, when they snift
they snift, and when they snuffle they--as it were--snuffle. That's how
you can tell. If you ask ME"--he passed his hand over the dog's back.
Percy uttered another cry. "I know what's the matter with him."

"A brute of a man kicked him at rehearsal. Do you think he's injured
internally?"

"It's rheumatism," said Archie. "Jolly old rheumatism. That's all that's
the trouble."

"Are you sure?"

"Absolutely!"

"But what can I do?"

"Give him a good hot bath, and mind and dry him well. He'll have a good
sleep then, and won't have any pain. Then, first thing to-morrow, you
want to give him salicylate of soda."

"I'll never remember that."-"I'll write it down for you. You ought to
give him from ten to twenty grains three times a day in an ounce of
water. And rub him with any good embrocation."

"And he won't die?"

"Die! He'll live to be as old as you are!