tardiness increased our anxious
compassion: His first journey; his first separation from his mother; this
black two-months' baby! Then the train ran in, and we hastened to look
for him. "Have you a dog for us?"

"A dog! Not in this van. Ask the rearguard."

"Have you a dog for us?"

"That's right. From Salisbury. Here's your wild beast, Sir!"

From behind a wooden crate we saw a long black muzzled nose poking round
at us, and heard a faint hoarse whimpering.

I remember my first thought:

"Isn't his nose too long?"

But to my companion's heart it went at once, because it was swollen from
crying and being pressed against things that he could not see through.
We took him out--soft, wobbly, tearful; set him down on his four, as yet
not quite simultaneous legs, and regarded him. Or, rather, my companion
did, having her head on one side, and a quavering smile; and I regarded
her, knowing that I should thereby get a truer impression of him.

He wandered a little round our legs, neither wagging his tail nor licking
at our hands; then he looked up, and my companion said: "He's an angel!"

I was not so certain. He seemed hammer-headed, with no eyes at all, and
little connection between his head, his body, and his legs. His ears
were very long, as long as his poor nose; and gleaming down in the
blackness of him I could see the same white star that disgraced his
mother's chest.

Picking him up, we carried him to a four-wheeled cab, and took his muzzle
off. His little dark-brown eyes were resolutely fixed on distance, and
by his refusal to even smell the biscuits we had brought to make him
happy, we knew that the human being had not yet come into a life that had
contained so far only a mother, a wood-shed, and four other soft, wobbly,
black, hammer-headed angels, smelling of themselves, and warmth, and wood
shavings. It was pleasant to feel that to us he would surrender an
untouched love, that is, if he would surrender anything. Suppose he did
not take to us!

And just then something must have stirred in him, for he turned up his
swollen nose and stared at my companion, and a little later rubbed the
dry pinkness of his tongue against my thumb. In that look, and that
unconscious restless lick; he was trying hard to leave unhappiness
behind, trying hard to feel that these new creatures with stroking paws
and queer scents, were his mother; yet all the time he knew, I am sure,
that they were something bigger,