towels and doing their best to scrub him dry on the way. But it was a
ruffled, soapsudsy and excessively drowsy Faithful Dog that trotted out
upon the stage, yawned in the face of the rapturous greeting of his
congregated friends, the Barn Swallows, jumped up on the prison cot,
never meant for him, and rolled himself into a solid slumber-ball,
refusing to wake, not even so much as blink, from first to last of the
drama. With natural presence of mind, an essential quality in spies,
the hero soliloquized to the audience that his Faithful Dog had been
drugged, evoking a round of applause at which Sigurd dreamily flapped
his tail.

One role that he never could be induced to play was that of Dandy. One
Sunday afternoon, when he came limping in with his feet all cut and
sore from a morning frisk over rough ice, I dressed them in discarded
white kid gloves, tying each firmly round the ankle, and started out
with Sigurd for a call on the Dryad. But our sturdy Viking resented
such dudish apparel and would flump down, at brief intervals, on the
crusted drifts and tug away at that detested frippery with the result
that, on his arrival, only the paw he thrust out at his amused hostess
was still elegant in a tatter of white kid.

Sigurd believed in elective courses rather than required. There were
certain things that, as a matter of principle, he persistently refused
to learn. Though by nature a dig, as my sister's flower-beds too often
testified, not her most fervent remonstrances could convince him that
bulbs and bones should not be planted together. His general attitude
toward education was not unique. He had "come to college for the life."
From the narrow paths of learning he bounded off in pursuit of a
"well-rounded development." His social engagements were numerous and
pressing. Often he had not time, between afternoon tea in one dormitory
and a birthday spread in another, to scamper home for the plain
parenthesis of a dog-biscuit dinner. Sometimes we would hear our
truant, in the small hours, drop down upon the porch with a thud of
utter exhaustion, and would learn by degrees, during the next day or
two, that he had gone with a botany or geology class on a long morning
tramp, played hare and hounds with one of the athletic teams all the
afternoon and paraded the town till midnight with a serenading party.
Often in the spring weather we would not set eyes on him for two days
running, or might, perhaps, catch a passing glimp