When his Grandfather amuses himself by what he calls “Squeezing the growls out” every morning, Loki tries vainly to keep up a show of displeasure, but always ends on his back with a windmill waving of pretty prayerful paws.
Loki has his own very marked ideas on the subject of jokes; at least he has one—in fact, an only joke! It took his Grandfather some time to apprehend it; but constant repetition of the incident ‹after the consecrated fashion of the British farce› is beginning to make him see the point of it. The joke is this: at the top, or the bottom, of the garden, as the case may be, coming in from, or going out for, a walk, Loki stands stock still, generally unperceived till you are midway. No coaxing, whistling, or screaming will budge him. He will stand there a quarter of an hour, it may be. And the point of the joke is that you must get behind him and stamp your feet, and say “Naughty Dog!” Then Loki careers up or down in paroxysms of merriment. This may not appeal to some people’s special bump of hilarity; and as it is useless to try to explain a jest, we will leave those to enjoy the spinach story.
XXXII
England is so seldom visited by hot weather such as we now have, that, especially in our little place with its foreign stamp within and without, one keeps thinking of other lands. There was the one hot summer we went visiting in country houses in Italy—two country houses, to be precise, and both of them were “castelli.”
A CASTELLO IN PIEDMONT
The first ‹which we preferred vastly› was on a high plateau in the middle of the Piedmontese plain, not far from Turin. From that entrancing spot the view lay over wide undulating stretches of maize fields and vineyards; and the eye could not turn North, West, East or South without resting on a distant panorama of Alps or Apennines.
That was a hot summer with a vengeance! We were met in the dusk of the evening—the soft warm dusk of such days in Italy, when the caress of the air is like the touch of velvet—by a gay little equipage drawn by three mountain horses abreast, each with a collar of bells and a red hussar plume erect on its forehead. It was the most merry vehicle we have ever driven in. How those horses went! How they tossed their heads and how their bells jangled!