ce off
me tongue, whin she wagged her tail three times."

It was a marvel. Oh, these were going to be great days!

"If you're a lady-dog, wag your tail three times," I ordered, squatting to
peer into the sagacious brown eyes.

Three times the stocky tail thumped the floor.

Then Angel put the question, and was answered with equal promptitude.

It was The Seraph's turn. With an insinuating smile he said: "If you are a
gennelman dog wag your tail fwee times."

But before there was time for so much as one wag, Mary Ellen caught the
too-eager tail in a restraining grasp.

"Now have done wid your nonsinse," she commanded. "Ye'll have the pore
crature that worried it'll set up barkin', an' if the misthress did know,
there be's a dawg in the house, she'd likely just throw a fit an' die."

"Is it a vewy barkable dog?" queried The Seraph.

"All dogs is barkable," said Mary Ellen, "and what we'll have to do is to
kape her as quate as possible and pray that her owner'll come along this
way, for turn her out I will not. It's easy seein' she's a pet be the ways
of her."

"It says 'Giftie' on her collar," Angel announced, separating the short,
shaggy coat to read. "That must be her name. Hello, Giftie! Sit up,
Giftie!"

So Giftie she was, and, for a long three weeks, our joy and our delight.

Was ever little body so full of spirit and the pride of life? The kitchen
became her own domain where the three of us fought for the position of her
most abject slave. Even Mary Ellen could scarcely work for watching her
antics with an old stocking, which she pretended was a rat. Once she caught
a live mouse and set us all shouting. Mary Ellen, in her excitement, upset
a gravy-boat of hot gravy, and The Seraph slipped and sat down in it, and
Giftie gambolling, mouse in mouth, ran through it and tracked it over the
freshly scrubbed boards. If she had been a tigress with her prey she could
not have been more ferocious with the mouse. She snarled at it: she worried
it: she threw it up in the air and caught it: she laid it on the scullery
floor and rolled on it: and when, finally, it ceased to squirm beneath her,
she lay quite still, gazing pensively up at us with liquid eyes, and only
now and then twitching her hind-quarters to remind her victim that she was
still on the job.

One never-to-be-forgotten day she rollicked into the kitchen proudly
carrying Mrs. Handsomebody's solemn black shoe, which had been standing
with its mate bene