from that memory to his
antics a few evenings earlier, when he had been out frisking with some
dog callers in the comparative cool. He woofed imperiously at the
screen door and, as soon as it was unlatched, dashed it open and came
tearing into the study to demand of me some service that I was slow to
comprehend.

"How dull you are to-night!" he grunted and, flouncing down beside me,
fell clumsily to work on a hind paw. Investigating, I found a long
thorn run up into the pad. It took me a minute or two to grip it and
pull it out, while Sigurd, wincing a little but with full confidence in
my surgery, waited as patiently as a boy when a ball game is on. When
the thorn was drawn, he gave one flying lick to his foot and another to
my hand--"Much obliged, but you might have been quicker about it"--and
bounded back to his play with puppy eagerness.

We had made all possible arrangements for his comfort, boarding him
still at his home where three of the household remained with the new
tenants, but he was no longer the Lord of the Scarab. We knew that he
would do his golden best and we hoped that in his own sweet wisdom he
would realize that love never goes away, but as he watched and searched
in vain, week after week and month after month, Sigurd drooped, and
grew deaf with listening for voices over sea. Old friends took him on
the short walks that sufficed him now and affectionate greetings met
him everywhere on campus and on street. He would often be seen napping
on one neighborly porch or another, for he dwelt more and more in the
dim land of "Nod, the shepherd," consorting with

"His blind old sheep-dog, Slumber-soon."

Housewife Honey-voice gave him true and tender care, and when, on a
zero night, she had to deny him the warmth of the Scarab and put him to
bed, well tucked up with rugs, in Sigurd's House, she would tell him,
for the strengthening of his spirit, that "even Jesus Christ slept in
the straw."

For our own part, we tried not to think too much of our forsaken
collie, but up in Norway we heard dogs called by his name and even on
our housetop promenades in Seville we were reminded of his frolic grace
by a scalawag puppy on a neighboring flat roof, a gleeful little
gymnast whose joy it was to leap up and jerk the linen off the line.
Sigurd's friends and ours wrote to us of his welfare with a
cheerfulness that was apt to waver before the end of the paragraph.

"I met him on the campus yesterday," scribbl