Your father and mother, and even the hired girl, proposed names, all of which you rejected with scorn, until, suddenly, into existence popped a name which came like an old friend. You seized it, attached it to the pup, and it just fitted. No longer was he to be referred to as “it,” or “he,” or “the puppy.” He possessed a personality.
The hired girl—and in those days there were more “hired girls” than “domestics”—was the last to yield to his sway. She did not like dogs or cats about the house; dogs caused extra-work, and cats got under foot.
But upon about the third morning after his arrival you caught her surreptitiously throwing him a crust from among the table leavings that she was bearing to the alley; and you knew that he had won her. Aye, he had won her. You also found out that he much preferred a crust thus flung to him from the garbage to any carefully prepared mess of more wholesome food.
Probably this subtle flattery pleased the girl, for although her grimness never vanished, once in a while you descried her smiling through it, in the course of a trip to the back fence while the puppy faithfully gamboled at her skirts in tumultuous expectation of another fall of manna.
He grew visibly—like the seed planted by the Indian fakir. Enormous quantities of bread and milk he gobbled, always appearing in fear lest the supply should sink through the floor before he had eaten his fill. Between meals his body waned to ordinary size; but, mercy! what a transformation as he ate! At these times it swelled and swelled, until, the pan empty, the stomach full, its diameter far exceeded its length.
However, there was a more permanent growth than this, as you discovered when you awoke to the fact that his collar was too tight for him. So you removed it, and in the interval between removing the old and getting the new properly engraved, his neck expanded fully an inch. The old collar would not meet around it when, as a test, you experimented.
