y, when we saw in the village
square before us a sudden commotion, people running from all sides
toward that familiar little carriage, which, rashly left standing at
the edge of the curb with its hood open toward the wind, had been
overset, so that the poor lady, strapped to the seat, was standing on
her bonnet. Sigurd reached her first of all and when, shocked by the
jar into a momentary oblivion, she looked up, "it was," she afterward
said, "right into the kindest, most reassuring brown eyes in the
world," for Sigurd's head was drooping close above her own and all the
help that a collie could give beamed in his friendly gaze.

Hints of age began to appear, reluctant though we were to recognize
them, in Sigurd himself,--an inclination toward longer and longer naps
in his own disreputable chair, an increasing resentment of sweeping
days and housecleaning, and a tendency, long after a swollen ear or a
sharp attack of eczema was cured and Sigurd, settling his chin on his
paws, had dismissed Dr. Vet with a low, majestic sweep of tail, to
continue to claim the lazy privileges of an invalid. Sometimes his
stiffening limbs failed to fold themselves with the old comfort into
the hollow of his chair, and he would look up to us in puzzled appeal.
He was a handsome collie still, but his manners had grown more reserved
and his bearing more stately. He was no longer excited by Commencement
festivities, though he would stroll up to take a look at the Tree Day
dances and saunter into the Garden Party, accepting the embraces of old
friends and new with an amiability only slightly tinged with boredom.
But he loved more and more to bask in the sun on the south porch or to
dream, his legs tied into his favorite bowknot, in front of the study
fireplace, where Joy-of-Life's annual barrel of Christmas driftwood
made the flames look like little rainbows on a holiday.

He was almost ten years old when he was run over by an automobile.
Except for a bruised paw he did not seem to be hurt, for he crouched so
flat in the road that the machine merely scraped his back, but his
nerves were severely shaken. When we came home that noon, he greeted us
with a prolonged, strange howl, unlike anything that we had ever heard
from him before, and for weeks would not venture out upon the roads
without one of us to serve as bodyguard, wheedling until we had to drop
our books and devise some respectable excuse for a walk. Left behind at
a Greek Letter Society