"Thy faith is all the knowledge that thou hast."
—Jonson's Epigrams, XVIII.
Whatever may be thought of Sigurd's college career, there can be no doubt that he careered through college. He was at the top of bliss in a mad run over the campus. With streaming ruff and tail he would rush on like Lelaps, the wild hound of Cephalus on the trail of the monstrous fox sent by a slighted goddess to harass the Thebans and, like Lelaps when the Olympians chose to make the chase eternal by turning both dog and fox to stone, Sigurd would come to a sudden stop on the brow of a hill, standing out against the sky like a collie statue poised for running.
Joy-of-Life could cross the broad meadow almost as lightly and swiftly as he and their morning pilgrimages to chapel were expeditions of high glory. There were hundreds of girls abroad at that hour and often Sigurd would wheel from the path and dash jubilantly toward any figure that took his fancy, confident of welcome. But if the individual chanced to be a new freshman, not yet acquainted with the college dignitaries, she might meet his advances with fear or annoyance or a still more cutting indifference. Then Sigurd would droop those expectant ears of his and return with dignity to his forsaken comrade. If his greeting were properly reciprocated, he would ramp joyously upon his fellow student and prance about her, leaping to the height of her shoulders in his ecstasy of good-will.
His favorite laboratory was Lake Waban. In the summer afternoons he would tease to have us both escort him up for his swim and if on the way we tried to part company, one or the other turning aside for a more pressing errand, Sigurd would herd us with ancestral art, jumping upon the deserter and gently pushing her back, or standing in the path to block her progress, protesting all the while with coaxing whines, with expostulary barks and with all manner of collie eloquence. If we walked, on the other hand, close together, absorbed in talk, he would jealously push in between us, as he often did when we were having a fireside tête-à-tête or bidding each other good night. He wished us to understand that Sigurd was the one to be loved and that all affections not directed toward Sigurd were superfluous. But when we both accepted his invitation to the lake, the three hundred acres of the college park hardly sufficed for his antics. Curveting about us till he seemed to be ten collies at once, flashing in ever widening circles over the level and over the slopes, bounding upon us with a storm of gleeful sneezes, he would lead the way to Sigurd's Tub, as he considered it. If some one fell in with us and joined us on the walk, Sigurd, always of courteous instinct, would drop back and follow demurely, or amuse himself at a decorous distance by investigating holes, chasing squirrels and striving with wild springs, scrambles, clawings, to climb the trees from whose boughs they mocked his clumsy efforts. But how rejoiced he would be when the interloper turned off! "There! Gone at last! Now we will have fun, all by ourselves!" Then he would cast about for some doughty deed to do, longing to dazzle us by a prodigious feat of strength and skill. If he could find a young tree that our too efficient forestry had cut down he would drag it along, bite and break away its branches, seize it by the middle and balance it in his mouth as a long pole, constantly lifting his bright eyes to us for admiration.
Once arrived at the lake, it was our duty to find sticks and fling them out over the water to the extent of our strength, while Sigurd swam for them, the farther the better. As he would gallantly splash up from the shallows and, stick in mouth, climb the bushy bank, we had to run from the mighty shaking with which, delivering the prize, he loved to give us a shower-bath. After a few such plunges, Sigurd, while we rested on the bank, would appropriate the green apron of Mother Earth for a towel, rolling over and over on the turf to dry himself and completing the process by scampers in the sun. He disliked being wet, for although these swims in the lake ranked among his prime delights, at home he always resented and resisted a bath and, on a showery day, would often run in to the towel rack, pleading to be wiped dry, and would then forthwith run out into the rain again. In our hottest weather he would slip off alone in the early morning to that still lake all sweet with water-lilies and would be gone for hours. A few times, in his younger years, our anxiety took us by mid-day to the shore, whence we would see a yellow head well out in the water. At our whistle, Sigurd would turn and swim back to us with an air of surprise and pleasure as if he had quite forgotten that such dear friends were to be found on land. The outcome was not so happy when, tormented in his fur coat by the heat, he had stolen off to one of his secret mire-pits and indulged in a cool wallow. When he came home plastered and perfumed from head to tail, we would greet him with exclamations of disgust, which brought the Byronic melancholy into his eyes, hustle him off to the rocks behind the house, fling pailfuls of warm water over him and do our best to scrape off his pollutions. On one of these occasions, a college-girl lover and Wallace raced him up to Waban and scrubbed and rinsed him until, so they said, the entire lake had changed color.
In the autumn term Sigurd would take a special course in harvesting, frisking through a neighboring orchard and playing ball with the falling apples. The winter term he gave mainly to athletics and dramatics. How bewildered he was that first snowy morning when he ran out into a strange white ravine bounded by slippery walls and when, desperately lunging over one of these, he felt himself floundering in a drift! His first dubious venture on a crackling sheet of ice taxed his puppy courage, too, but he persisted in his quivering progress across our little Longfellow Pond and swaggered up the further side with his jauntiest sporting air. In later years he enjoyed nothing better than going skating with Lady Blanche, another member of our changeful household, and on a stinging January morning he would outdo the frolics, that Cowper smiled to watch, of the dog who
"with many a frisk
Wide scampering, snatches up the drifted snow
With ivory teeth, or ploughs it with his snout;