oling fudge, but all with a comical air of
condescension. He was himself accustomed to the best society, even
seniors. Our gracious college president made him welcome to her
veranda, as she sat at tea among her roses; a beloved frequenter of the
Scarab, Hoops-of-Steel, though clinging to her preference for boys,
accorded him a true if tempered friendship; and even Scholar Carol, our
fifteenth-century historian, who affected the fireside sphinx and had
named a particularly gallant kitten Eddy IV, counted him only a little
lower than a cat. As for the children on our hill, they hugged him to
the limit of endurance. His warmest admirer among them was Wee-wee, a
rosy bunch of unweariable energy, who, when she came to us of an
afternoon in order to give her exhausted parents a brief respite, would
wear out the entire family as, one by one, we undertook to amuse her,
and would finally fling herself upon Sigurd, riding on his back,
rolling him over and over and examining his paws with an envious
admiration that broke forth in the remark: "Wen I'm old and big like
Sigurd, maybe I'll have feet on _my_ hands."

For two lively years a brace of graduate students, Cherub and Seraph,
folded their wings beneath the Scarab rooftree. Cherub was a bit
afraid, at first, of "that bouncing yellow elephant," but Seraph
instantly became Sigurd's very pink of playmates. Every morning they
would start off early for the college library, scampering across the
landscape at a rate that sent the sparrows fluttering from their path
like so many irregular verbs. Between the meadow and the campus is a
perilous stretch of railway tracks and trolley tracks, and here Sigurd
would assume full charge of his companion. If the whistle of an engine,
as they drew near the crossing, cut the air, Sigurd would leap upon her
and, with his paws upon her breast, hold her back until the train had
hurtled by, when he would lead her triumphantly across under the
trailing plume of smoke. Every autumnal Sunday they spent hours
together in the woods, from which the Seraph would bring home gentians,
wych-hazel and a lyric, and Sigurd a ruff all tangled up with burrs.
Winter did not daunt their zeal. They formed themselves into a rescue
expedition and saved from the frost all manner of wild-flower roots,
which the Seraph arranged in rows of pots placed on boards stretched
from a little table in her room to her south window. Alas for sweet
Saint Charity! There came a day when