"I liked your dog the moment I saw her," she went on: "I owned one like her three years ago."
John Thomas, having found his nail, hesitated no longer, but began to drive it into the frame with ringing strokes. Miss Billy waited until the hammering subsided.
"A friend of father's gave her to me when she was a little bow-legged puppy. She was a beautiful dog, white, with nice burnt sienna spots, and a lovely disposition. I named her Serena on account of that disposition. But she had the funniest looking tail, with three queer kind of corkscrews in it." (Miss Billy illustrated with a whirl of her forefinger that was entirely lost upon John Thomas.)
"But I didn't care,—I loved Serena, if her tail did go in a corkscrew. But one summer my cousin, who was studying medicine, came to visit us, and Serena's tail seemed to bother him an awful lot. He kept making remarks about it all the time, and said it had been broken and ought to come off. So at last I consented."
John Thomas had picked out another nail, but now for the first time began to display interest in the story, and looked up from his work as Miss Billy went on:
"We gave her chloroform: I held the sponge myself while my cousin performed the operation. It didn't hurt her at all, and she really seemed handsomer without the tail, but a sorry sequel followed. I went to Philadelphia soon after, and while I was there my uncle took me to a dog show. I never before saw so many beautiful dogs and among them was one almost exactly like my Serena, and with three twists in her tail."
"'You have a dog just like mine,' I said to the man who owned her.
"'Has your dog a tail like this?' he asked.
"I told him 'yes,' and was just going on to explain to him how I had had it operated upon when he interrupted me. 'Then it was a good breed,' he said. 'That tail is the mark of a fine dog. Each curl in the tail adds fifteen dollars to the value of the animal.'"
Miss Billy's eyes looked solemnly down into John Thomas's widely distended orbs: "Think of it!" she said: "Forty-five dollars cut off at one fell swoop! I can assure you my cousin has never heard the last of it."