"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 another these days celebrate some trial or triumph, some deep experience of the soul.
There is Melon Day, for example,—a movable feast-day in August, if indeed it come so early, when we pick the first watermelon. That, you ask, a deep emotional experience, an affair of the soul?