Yet change was busy about our collie, who welcomed no changes but loved his world exactly as it was. We sold the first home and moved into a more spacious one that we had built on a strip of untamed land hard by. Then a street came, and more houses, and quietly the wildwood drew away from us. Within our own bounds, at least, we strove to keep the forest growth in its own careless beauty, but never a man stepped on the place, brother or guest or gardener or state warden or whosoever, but, driven by the deep instinct of the pioneer, he must needs go stealthily forth with ax or saw or shears and lay about him in our happy tangle. The worst of it was that we had to appear grateful.
Sigurd accepted his new abode with but a passing bewilderment. Racing up from the train on his return from a summer in the mountains with Joy-of-Life, he was whistled into the Scarab while yet too utterly absorbed in the rapture of his greetings to heed where he was. After a little he looked about him in obvious surprise and perplexity and set out at once on a tour of investigation, trotting from cellar to attic, nosing into the closets and under the shelves, sniffing at the familiar desks and bookcases and recognizing with a wag his own chair and rug. As soon as might be he was out of doors, examining porches and paths. Then he crossed the intervening bit of wilderness, granite ledge matted over with the red-berried kinnikinic, and woofed for admittance at his accustomed door. He was kindly received and allowed to go about as he liked, upstairs and downstairs and into my lord's chamber, but the furniture was not his furniture, the smells were not his smells, and within ten minutes he had quitted those rooms, scene of so many puppy exploits, to enter them no more. He knew the difference between house and home.
Yet our new holding did not seem to Sigurd nor to us entirely natural until he had cut one of his unfortunate paws on a broken bottle left by the carpenters as a souvenir and had strewn steps and driveway and lawn with shreds of cotton bandages and adhesive plaster. "When is a clutter not a clutter?" asked my mother, and answered her own conundrum: "When Sigurd does it."
In a snug corner against the south wall of the Scarab stood a massive and elegant erection, with gable roof and olive-green door, that only the unsophisticated called a kennel. It was "Sigurd's House," and as such he accepted it, counting its artistically shingled walls and heavy layers of sheathing paper no more than his just deserts. He delighted in its deep bed of fresh straw which tickled him most agreeably as he rolled over and over in it. He found it an exciting by-play, too, to dash in with stick or bone and lose it under his bedding, which he would proceed to scratch up with all the fury of a New England matron in housecleaning time. Then he would come swaggering out with the air of duty done, shaking his own skin. Sigurd's House was such a palace that the children of the neighborhood liked to play in it, but our collie deemed this high trespass and, from the screened study porch, would roar indignant protest when five or six chubby tots, with that saucy black spaniel, Curly, would all squeeze in together.
To the Scarab came new friends for Sigurd with new caresses, to which he always made cordial and courteous response. Amelia crossed the ocean to a waiting bridegroom and a happy home of her own, but Housewife Honey-voice, with her little Esther, petted Sigurd even more devotedly.
Sigurd's only difficulty with Housewife Honey-voice, the only shadow on their sympathy, arose from the delicacy of her appetite by which she was inclined, at first, to measure his. When her enthusiasm and culinary skill persuaded the family to go on a vegetable diet, Sigurd gave us clearly to understand that we need not count him in. And when I came home, one evening, from a week's motor trip, Sigurd barely waited for his customary chant of welcome before gripping my dress and leading me to the refrigerator.
"Hasn't Sigurd had his dinner yet?"
"Why, yes, an hour ago."
"Nonsense, boy! You're not hungry. Nobody is hungry just after dinner."
"What a whopper!" sighed Sigurd, as he pattered after me back to the study.