rk of Cerberus here filleth all the place,
As huge he lieth in a den that hath them full in face;
But when the adders she beheld upon his crest up-borne,
A sleepy morsel honey-steeped and blent of wizard's corn,
She cast him: then his three-fold throat, all wild with hunger's lack,
He opened wide, and caught at it, and sank his monstrous back,
And there he lay upon the earth enormous through the cave."

Sigurd would softly thump his tail in cadence with the melancholy beat
of a dog elegy, whether Prior's tribute to the virtues of Queen Mary's
True, or Gay's ironic consolation to Celia on the death of her lap-dog
Shock, Cowper's impartial epitaphs for My Lord's pointer Neptune and My
Lady's spaniel Fop, Lehmann's memorial of his retriever, who

"Chose, since official dogs at times unbend,
The household cat for confidante and friend,"

Louise Imogen Guiney's lament for

"All the sweet wavy
Beauty of Davy,"

or Winifred Letts' apostrophe to the debonair collie Scott, or Hilton
Brown's tenderest of farewells to his Scotch terrier, Hamish.

"In the nether spaces
Will the soul of a Little Black Dog despair?
Will the Quiet Folk scare him with shadow-faces?
And how will he tackle the Strange Beasts there?
Tail held high, I'll warrant, and bristling,
Marching stoutly if sore afraid,
Padding it steadily, softly whistling;--
That's how the Little Black Devil was made."

Sigurd lived too early to take part in the Free Verse controversy, but
he evinced an open mind on matters metrical in that he liked Lord
Byron's inscription for his Newfoundland Boatswain no better than Lord
Eldon's for his Newfoundland Caesar. It was Sir William Watson's famous
quatrain, _An Epitaph_, that affected him most keenly, because it
invited emphasis on the one word that always brought him springing to
his feet.

"His friends he loved. His fellest earthly foes
--Cats--I believe he did but feign to hate.
My hand will miss the insinuated nose,
Mine eyes the tail that wagged contempt at Fate."

As Sigurd was duly shown _Canis Major_ in the ethereal heavens, so was
he introduced to certain starry dogs that shine in the skies of English
poetry,--the pampered "smale houndes" of Chaucer's Prioress, King
Lear's elegant little "Tray, Blanche, and Sweetheart," dear, clownish
Crab, and all that pack of rich-voiced hunting hounds whose "gallan