crouching, anxious puppy to his four feet and snap on his new leash.

His troubled eyes would well over with expostulatory questions:

"Say, why is this? wherefore? what should we do?"

"We're going to walk, Little Stick-in-the-Mud. Come on!"

And thus Hamlet, "with much forcing of his disposition," would undergo
the daily constitutional, which he converted into a genuine gymnastic
exercise for us both by pulling back on the leash with all his
considerable strength, protesting:

"It is not, nor it cannot come to good;
But break my heart, for I must hold my tongue."

In this ignoble fashion I would drag him along for a mile or so of the
least frequented road, until he would suddenly fix his slender legs and
refuse to be budged:

"Where wilt thou lead me? speak;
I'll go no further."

"Very well! If you insist on turning back here, you know what will
happen. It will be your turn to drag me."

To this he had always the same rejoinder:

"'Tis true 'tis pity,
And pity 'tis 'tis true."

So Hamlet, all his soul set on getting back to the comparative security
of that veranda, would fall to tugging like an infant Hercules,
scrabbling me along, regardless of sidewalks, by the nearest route to
safety, till I felt myself, on reaching home, more than ever a
"quintessence of dust."

When I tried him off the leash, he would, even into the autumn, run
back to the kennels, though he would let no one there touch him but the
gypsy-tanned child. Later, he would slip back to the Scarab, usually
after dark, but be afraid to come near or ask admittance, sweeping
around the house in wide, wistful circles. It took our softest coaxings
to bring that palpitating puppy across the threshold and, once in, we
all had to shake paws with him many times before he would believe
himself welcome and sink down at my feet to sleep away his tiredness
and terror. It was midsummer before I dared loose him on the campus for
a free scamper, from which, hesitant, with many tremors and recoils, he
came back to me in answer to my call. I thought then that the battle
was won, but the next time I ventured it, and the next, he ran away.
Yet before the leaves fell we had made such progress that when I
fastened on his leash and invited him to go to walk,

"there did seem in him a kind of joy
To hear of it."

For weeks the rooms of the house were to this kennel-bred puppy no
better than torture-chambers,