At last, stretching himself drowsily to sleep, he died.
It seemed impossible that such a swirl of glad life and mischief and beauty could have been wiped out in twenty-four little hours.
Not for our virtues nor for our general worthiness are we remembered wistfully by those who stay on. Not for our sterling qualities are we cruelly missed when missing is futile. Worthiness, in its death, does not leave behind it the grinding heartache that comes at memory of some lovably naughty or mischievous or delightfully perverse trait.
Treve’s entertaining badnesses had woven themselves into the very life of the Place. Their passing left a keen hurt. The more so because, under them, lay bedrock of staunch loyalty and gentleness.
I have not the skill to paint our eccentrically lovable chum’s word picture, except in this clumsily written sketch. If I were to attempt to make a whole book of him, the result would be a daub.
But I have tried at least to make his name remembered by a few readers; by giving it to the hero of this collection of stories. Perhaps some one, reading, may like the name, even if not the stories; and may call his or her next collie, “Treve”; in memory of a gallant dog that was dear to Sunnybank.
We buried him in the woods, near the house, here. A granite bowlder serves as his headstone.
Alongside that bowlder, a few days ago, we buried the Mistress’s hero collie, Wolf; close to his old-time playmate, Treve.
Perhaps you may care to hear a word or two of Wolf’s plucky death. Some of you have read his adventures in my other dog stories. More of you read of his passing. For nearly every newspaper in America printed a long account of it.
It is an account worth reading and rereading; as is every tale of clean courage. I am going to quote part of the finely-written story that appeared in the New York Times of June 28, 1923; a story far beyond power of mine to improve on or to equal: