d between them, is not fit for print.

Every evening of that first week our hero was carried or helped
downstairs and put to bed on the piazza, but every morning he crawled
and scrambled up again, crying out like a child as his injured leg,
trailing behind him, suffered jar or bump. Nobody could resist his
pleading to be lifted back to the bed and allowed to play hospital a
little longer, and Cecilia, more than ever his devoted slave, delighted
in bringing him, to his enormous pride, his dinner on a tray. He always
barked for the family to come in and behold that glorious spectacle,
and he barked, too, whenever the door bell rang, requesting the caller
to come up at once and pay respects to the Happy Warrior. Apart from
these red-letter events, his great diversion was trying to rid his
muffled leg of the bandages and plaster,--an exercise in which he soon
became only too proficient.

In Sigurd's last fight--with a gallant old mastiff, Rex--one of his
forelegs, bitten in three places, was put out of action for two months,
but no fuss was made about it. We had grown hardened to Sigurd's
battle-wounds. Sulpho-naphthol and his own tongue worked the cure,
though it took no little ingenuity to extract from between Sigurd's
teeth the stray tufts of grizzled hair that he wanted to keep as
souvenirs of Rex, who, still feebly growling, had to be fetched off the
field in a wheelbarrow.

From first to last, Sigurd's adventures were too often misadventures.
As a youngster, he was continually getting into trouble. It seemed
unfortunate that he should have so many feet, for what with thorns,
tacks, broken glass, jagged ice and the like, one or another of them
was usually in piteous condition.

His name brought more than one fight upon him, as our call of _Sigurd!_
_Sigurd!_ when he started out to investigate a dog-stranger, was often
mistaken for _Sick 'em!_ _Sick 'em!_ and the dog's owner would
reciprocate in kind. Once an indignant father, a summer visitor in
the town, passionately charged us with setting our dog on his two
"motherless boys," whereas we had been doing our best to call Sigurd
off from a chase after those provoking little rascals, who had attacked
him with a shower of pebbles.

Restless with his waxing strength he took to roving in the woods, where
once he was caught in a trap and painfully dragged himself home with a
lacerated leg that he had torn free from the cruel grip of the steel.
In the West Woods he once