with a
sunburned hand from whose light caress he at once shuddered away. "I'll
come to see you by and by."

"By and by is easily said," the puppy made answer with incredulous eyes
that first watched her out of sight and then rolled in anguish of
despair from the wire screening of the porch to roof and wall.

"Is your name Blazey?" I asked him gently, but his fit of ague only
grew worse as he turned his ghastly stare on me

"with a look so piteous in purport
As if he had been loosed out of hell
To speak of horrors."

"I made further efforts at conversation while the day wore on, but that
little yellow image of throbbing terror, upright in the remotest
corner, would not even turn its head toward my voice. In vain I
remonstrated:

"Alas, how is't with you,
That you do bend your eye on vacancy
And with the incorporal air do hold discourse?
Forth at your eyes your spirits wildly peep."

The constant tremble of the poor, scared, pitiful puppy was intensified
by every train whistle and motor horn to a violent shaking. I could not
flutter a leaf nor drop a pencil without causing a nervous twitch of
the brown ears. Suddenly the crack of an early Fourth of July torpedo
electrified him into a frenzy of fright. If it had been the fatal shot
in reserve for Blazey he could not have made a madder leap nor wheeled
about in more distracted circles. In one of these lunatic reels he
struck against me and, gathering him close, I crooned such comfort as I
had into that dizzy, quivering, pathetic face; but he tore himself
loose and fled gasping back to his corner beseeching a perilous and
cruel universe to let him alone. I, for one, declined:

"Angels and ministers of grace, defend us!--
Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damn'd,
Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell,
Be thy intents wicked or charitable,
Thou comest in such a questionable shape
That I will speak to thee; I'll call thee Hamlet."

The puppy accepted his new name, as he accepted his dinner, with
lugubrious resignation and the air of saying to himself:

"Heaven hath pleas'd it so,
To punish me with this, and this with me."

His misery was more appealing than a thousand funny gambols could have
been, and the household, those of us who were left, conspired in
various friendly devices to make him feel at home. The child at the
kennels had taught him one