oes belong."

"I don't want any chair, nor anything else with wooden legs."

"What kind of legs, then?"

"Bone ones."

"Why! why! I don't know any bone-legged things."

"Bones with hair on them."

"Oh, you want a Teddybear--_you_, and coming eight! Well! Well! But
Teddybears have wire legs, I think, instead of bone."

The set look settled once more on his little, square face and the talk
ceased. But the fight was on. Day after day, week after week, he had me
guessing--through all the living quadrupeds--through all the fossil
forms--through many that the Lord did not make, but might have made, had
Adam only known enough Greek and Latin to give them names. Gently,
persistently, he kept me guessing as the far-off day drew near, though
long since my only question had been--What breed? August came finally,
and a few days before the 24th we started by automobile for New Jersey.

We were speeding along the road for Princeton when all four boys leaned
forward from the back seat, and Babe, close in my ear, said:--

"Shall I have any birthday down here, Father?"

"Certainly."

"Have you guessed _what_ yet?"

I blew the horn fiercely, opened up the throttle till the words were
snatched from his teeth by the swirling dust behind and conversation was
made impossible. Two days later, the birthday found us at Uncle Joe's.

Babe was playing with Trouble, the little Scotch-Irish terrier, when
Uncle Joe and I came into the yard. With Trouble in his arms Babe looked
up and asked:--

"Uncle Joe, could you guess what four-legged thing I want for my
birthday?"

"You want a dog," said Uncle Joe, and I caught up the dear child in my
arms and kept back his cries with kisses.

"And you shall have one, too, if you will give me three or four weeks to
get him for you. Trouble here is the daddy of--goodness! I suppose he
is--of I don't know how many little puppies--but a good many--and I am
giving you one of them right now, for this birthday, only, you will wait
till their mother weans them, of course?"

"Yes, yes, of course!"

And so it happened that several weeks later a tiny black-and-tan puppy
with nothing much of a tail came through from New Jersey to Hingham to
hearts that had waited for him very, very long.

Pup's birthday makes the seventh red-letter day of that kind on the
calendar. These are only the beginning of such days, our own peculiar
days when we keep tryst with ourselves, because in one way or a