ind, but I stopped to see how Lil would receive
the returned companion of old days. It is scarcely probable that dogs
believe in ghosts, and yet it would have been easy to fancy that she saw
in him at first some purely supernatural apparition, she recoiled
with so obvious a surprise and terror when she first beheld him. The
wretched, propitiatory, humbly-ecstatic Schwartz advanced, but she
showed her gleaming teeth, and growled aversion. He stopped stock-still,
and whined a little, and Lil responded furiously. I took the returned
wanderer up in both hands, and carried him into the hotel scullery, and
got milk for him. He lapped it with tears running down his muddy nose;
and when I had had him washed and tucked away into an old railway rug,
beside a stove in the little room, he lay there winking and
blinking, and licked at his own tears with an expression altogether
broken-hearted. I should have liked to have known something of the
history of his subterranean wanderings, but that was only to be left to
conjecture. I bade him be of better cheer, and went outside to wait for
the return of the procession, and to smoke a cigar in the open air,
and an hour later found that Schwartz had again disappeared. This time,
however, he had merely gone home, and though for a day or two he was
quite an invalid, he was soon about the streets again, completely
rehabilitated.

And now I come to the relation of the one tragic fact which seemed to
me to make this simple history worth writing. I hope that nobody will
regard it as an invention, or will suppose that I am trading upon their
sympathies on false pretences.

On the day of the young Englishman's departure I accompanied him to the
railway station. Lil came down in attendance upon Scraper, and barked
fiercely at the departing train which bore him away. Schwartz followed
in humble pursuit of Lil, who, so far as I could understand affairs, had
never forgiven him for intruding himself in so unpresentable a guise,
and claiming acquaintance whilst she was engaged in conversation with a
swell like Scraper. From that hour she had refused to hold the slightest
communion with him, showing her teeth and growling in the cruellest
way whenever he approached her. In spite of this, Schwartz seemed to be
persuaded that, in the absence of his rival, he still stood a chance,
and day after day he followed her with the old fawning humbleness, and
day after day she received him with the same anger and d