XIII
OUR CALENDAR
There are four red-lettered calendars about the house: one with the Sundays in red; one with Sundays and the legal holidays in red; one with the Thursdays in red,—Thursday being publication day for the periodical sending out the calendar,—and one, our own calendar, with several sorts of days in red—all the high festival days here on Mullein Hill, the last to be added being the Pup's birthday which falls on September 15.
Pup's Christian name is Jersey,—because he came to us from that dear land by express when he was about the size of two pounds of sugar,—an explanation that in no manner accounts for all we went through in naming him. The christening hung fire from week to week, everybody calling him anything, until New Year's. It had to stop here. Returning from the city New Year's day I found, posted on the stand of my table-lamp, the cognomen done in red, this declaration:—
January 1, 1915
No person can call Jersey any other name but JERSEY. If anybody calls him any other name but Jersey, exceeding five times a day he will have to clean out his coop two times a day.
This was as plain as if it had been written on the wall. Somebody at last had spoken, and not as the scribes, either.
We shall celebrate Jersey's first birthday September 15, and already on the calendar the day is red—red, with the deep deep red of our six hearts! He is just a dog, a little roughish-haired mixed Scotch-and-Irish terrier, not big enough yet to wrestle with a woodchuck, but able to shake our affections as he shakes a rat. And that is because I am more than half through with my fourscore years and this is my first dog! And the boys—this is their first dog, too, every stray and tramp dog that they have brought home, having wandered off again.