ls down her back, and short frocks;
and the baby was a year old, and plump and dimpled, and fond of me,
and never could get enough of hauling on my tail, and hugging me, and
laughing out its innocent happiness; and Mr. Gray was thirty-eight, and
tall and slender and handsome, a little bald in front, alert, quick in
his movements, business-like, prompt, decided, unsentimental, and with
that kind of trim-chiseled face that just seems to glint and sparkle
with frosty intellectuality! He was a renowned scientist. I do not know
what the word means, but my mother would know how to use it and get
effects. She would know how to depress a rat-terrier with it and make a
lap-dog look sorry he came. But that is not the best one; the best one
was Laboratory. My mother could organize a Trust on that one that would
skin the tax-collars off the whole herd. The laboratory was not a
book, or a picture, or a place to wash your hands in, as the college
president's dog said--no, that is the lavatory; the laboratory is quite
different, and is filled with jars, and bottles, and electrics, and
wires, and strange machines; and every week other scientists came there
and sat in the place, and used the machines, and discussed, and made
what they called experiments and discoveries; and often I came, too,
and stood around and listened, and tried to learn, for the sake of my
mother, and in loving memory of her, although it was a pain to me, as
realizing what she was losing out of her life and I gaining nothing at
all; for try as I might, I was never able to make anything out of it at
all.

Other times I lay on the floor in the mistress's work-room and slept,
she gently using me for a foot-stool, knowing it pleased me, for it
was a caress; other times I spent an hour in the nursery, and got well
tousled and made happy; other times I watched by the crib there, when
the baby was asleep and the nurse out for a few minutes on the baby's
affairs; other times I romped and raced through the grounds and the
garden with Sadie till we were tired out, then slumbered on the grass in
the shade of a tree while she read her book; other times I went visiting
among the neighbor dogs--for there were some most pleasant ones not
far away, and one very handsome and courteous and graceful one,
a curly-haired Irish setter by the name of Robin Adair, who was a
Presbyterian like me, and belonged to the Scotch minister.

The servants in our house were all kind to me and were