ed Nannikachee, "and when I
asked him where his professors were, he galloped all over the snow,
remembering you as juncos, and on second thought he reared up against
an oak and barked up into its branches to scare you out of your holes,
convinced that you had come to a bad end and been turned into
squirrels. Such are the workings of the mighty mind you two sillies
credit him with! He looked as round and yellow as a Thanksgiving
pumpkin, but there was something wistful about him, too."

On the twenty-third of May, within a month of our return, Sigurd died.
To all his losses had been added, that spring, the loss of College
Hall, through whose familiar corridors he had roamed as usual, always
seeking, one March afternoon, and which he found the next morning a
desolation of blackened walls and blowing ashes. If Sigurd could have
counted into the hundreds, he would have known that every girl was
safe, but if he could have read in the papers of the quiet self-control
with which, roused from their sleep to find the flames crackling about
them, they had steadily carried through their fire-drill, formed their
lines, waited for the word and gone out in perfect order, he would have
been no prouder of them than he always was. Of course his Wellesley
girls would behave like that.

Sigurd crowded with the rest of the college into close quarters, where
he was more than ever underfoot. On that languid twenty-second of May
he slept all day along the threshold of the improvised postoffice, and
the hurrying feet stepped over him with unreproaching care. But with
the arrival of the late afternoon mail, the postmistress, knowing the
rush that was to come, said kindly to him:

"Now, Sigurd, you must really go away."

He rose slowly and moved from door to door till he came to the office
of the Christian Association. Assured of Samaritan shelter here, he
finished his snooze on their one rescued rug, but arrived at home in
punctual time for his dinner, and that night it chanced to be the
dinner Sigurd liked best. Little Esther, who had a romp with him on his
arrival, said he "smiled all over when he smelt the liver cooking."

He scraped out his pan to the last crumb and then lay down in a
favorite burrow of loose, cool earth for a twilight revery. One of the
household, a new lover, invited him to take a stroll with her, but he
excused himself with a grateful rub of his head against her knees.

He slept in Sigurd's House, as usual, and sta