me, and never could get enough of hauling on my tail, and hugging
me, and laughing out its innocent happiness; and Mr. Gray was
thirty-eight, and tall and slender and handsome, a little bald in
front, alert, quick in his movements, businesslike, prompt, decided,
unsentimental, and with that kind of trim-chiselled face that just
seems to glint and sparkle with frosty intellectuality! He was a
renowned scientist. I do not know what the word means, but my mother
would know how to use it and get effects. She would know how to
depress a rat-terrier with it and make a lap-dog look sorry he came.
But that is not the best one; the best one was Laboratory. My mother
could organize a Trust on that one that would skin the tax-collars
off the whole herd. The laboratory was not a book, or a picture, or a
place to wash your hands in, as the college president's dog said--no,
that is the lavatory; the laboratory is quite different, and is
filled with jars, and bottles, and electrics, and wires, and strange
machines; and every week other scientists came there and sat in the
place, and used the machines, and discussed, and made what they called
experiments and discoveries; and often I came, too, and stood around
and listened, and tried to learn, for the sake of my mother, and in
loving memory of her, although it was a pain to me, as realizing what
she was losing out of her life and I gaining nothing at all; for try
as I might, I was never able to make anything out of it at all.

Other times I lay on the floor in the mistress's workroom and slept,
she gently using me for a footstool, knowing it pleased me, for it was
a caress; other times I spent an hour in the nursery, and got well
tousled and made happy; other times I watched by the crib there, when
the baby was asleep and the nurse out for a few minutes on the baby's
affairs; other times I romped and raced through the grounds and the
garden with Sadie till we were tired out, then slumbered on the grass
in the shade of a tree while she read her book; other times I went
visiting among the neighbor dogs,--for there were some most pleasant
ones not far away, and one very handsome and courteous and graceful
one, a curly haired Irish setter by the name of Robin Adair, who was a
Presbyterian like me, and belonged to the Scotch minister.

The servants in our house were all kind to me and were fond of me, and
so, as you see, mine was a pleasant life. There could not be a happier
dog than I wa