aid it. Then--well, then the
calling began again! All my sorrows came back. I said to myself, the
master will never forgive. I did not know what I had done to make him so
bitter and so unforgiving, yet I judged it was something a dog could not
understand, but which was clear to a man and dreadful.

They called and called--days and nights, it seemed to me. So long that
the hunger and thirst near drove me mad, and I recognized that I was
getting very weak. When you are this way you sleep a great deal, and I
did. Once I woke in an awful fright--it seemed to me that the calling
was right there in the garret! And so it was: it was Sadie's voice,
and she was crying; my name was falling from her lips all broken, poor
thing, and I could not believe my ears for the joy of it when I heard
her say:

"Come back to us--oh, come back to us, and forgive--it is all so sad
without our--"

I broke in with SUCH a grateful little yelp, and the next moment Sadie
was plunging and stumbling through the darkness and the lumber and
shouting for the family to hear, "She's found, she's found!"

The days that followed--well, they were wonderful. The mother and Sadie
and the servants--why, they just seemed to worship me. They couldn't
seem to make me a bed that was fine enough; and as for food, they
couldn't be satisfied with anything but game and delicacies that were
out of season; and every day the friends and neighbors flocked in to
hear about my heroism--that was the name they called it by, and it
means agriculture. I remember my mother pulling it on a kennel once, and
explaining it in that way, but didn't say what agriculture was, except
that it was synonymous with intramural incandescence; and a dozen times
a day Mrs. Gray and Sadie would tell the tale to new-comers, and say I
risked my life to say the baby's, and both of us had burns to prove it,
and then the company would pass me around and pet me and exclaim about
me, and you could see the pride in the eyes of Sadie and her mother; and
when the people wanted to know what made me limp, they looked ashamed
and changed the subject, and sometimes when people hunted them this way
and that way with questions about it, it looked to me as if they were
going to cry.

And this was not all the glory; no, the master's friends came, a whole
twenty of the most distinguished people, and had me in the laboratory,
and discussed me as if I was a kind of discovery; and some of them said
it was wonder