A saucier dinner-card was mine:
"You see her start out all agog
For chapel, pursued by her dog.
You may think her a saint,
But he thinks she ain't,
When she sets him to guarding a frog."
A dagger affixed to this effusion called attention to a learned note:
"This is a scientific error: the beast should be Bufo Lentiginosus not Rana catesbiana. Such errors are common in the best poetry."
As successive sorrows cast their shadows on our hearts, as the mothers slipped away, as the Dryad was smitten down in her brightness, a star fallen from midsummer sky, Sigurd proved himself a very comforter. The sympathetic droop of his ears and decorum of his disconsolate brown eyes in the first hush of mourning and, in the later loneliness, his nuzzling head against the knee, touches of a pleading tongue on hand and cheek, his insistence on an answering smile, a pat, a romp, his conviction that, while sun and wind made holiday and the wood was full of sticks to throw for Sigurd, it was natural to be glad, helped us better than more formal consolations. Both solitude and society, both ignorance and wisdom, he could press close to the hurt without intrusion. Often when one or the other of us, forgetful of the work upon the desk, had let the cloud creep over, Sigurd would rouse himself, trot across to the fireplace, select from the basket a piece of light kindling wood, and present it with the clear intimation that it would be more true to love to cheer up Sigurd with a bit of play than to lose the hour in grieving.
Rarely in his joyful life, and then but for a matter of days or weeks, had we both been away from Sigurd. He hated to have either of us go. He knew only too well the meaning of trunks and suitcases and always stalked uneasily about the room, getting in the way as much as possible, during the process of packing. When at last he saw these objects of ill omen closed and carried downstairs, followed by one of his mistresses in traveling garb, he would desperately take his stand in the doorway and, planting his legs like principles, do his best to bar her exit. For a few days he would be very restless, watchful, anxious, keeping close to the mistress who stayed behind to question her with troubled looks and entreat her not to abandon Sigurd; nor was the missing all on his side. The summer of 1908 was so hot that our gasping collie would tease his friends to fan him and, for the first and only time, we had him shaved. His bright hair, duly cleansed, was made up with corn-colored silk into a sofa-pillow and sent to Joy-of-Life, then sojourning in strange places, now among the Mormons, now on an Indian reservation, gathering material for her two vivid volumes on the Economic Beginnings of the Far West; and she assured him that his "yellow bunch of love" was a magical cure for a certain ache beyond the ken of the doctors. But grievously abashed he was with only the white waves of his ruff, his fore-pantalets and plumy tail unprofaned by the shears, and his sufferings from mortification and mosquitoes outwent all that he had endured from the heat. As his silky under-vest grew long enough to curl, he reminded us of Cagnotte, the supposed poodle bought for three-year-old Gautier by his nurse, on whom the Paris dealers palmed off a cur sewed up in a jacket of lamb's wool.