Sigurd Our Golden Collie, and Other Comrades of the Road

by Katharine Lee Bates

"Poor fellow! Poor beauty!" they crooned. "We know, we know. Our own dear collie was killed in just such a mix-up twenty years ago. Your collie knew that we would understand."

And Sigurd, restored in soul at last, licked their kind old faces and retired to his own cab. By the time he reached home, he was so completely himself again that he ate a hearty dinner and spent the better part of the evening scratching up the straw in Sigurd's House to see what treasures dogs and children might have stored there during his absence.

In the scorching July of 1913 we both left Sigurd for a year. The poor lad was so wretched with the heat that we hoped he might be less keenly aware than usual of the packing; but he knew. I do not like to remember the look in his eyes when, that last morning, he was brought up from his retreat in the cellar for good-by. I turn from that memory to his antics a few evenings earlier, when he had been out frisking with some dog callers in the comparative cool. He woofed imperiously at the screen door and, as soon as it was unlatched, dashed it open and came tearing into the study to demand of me some service that I was slow to comprehend.

"How dull you are to-night!" he grunted and, flouncing down beside me, fell clumsily to work on a hind paw. Investigating, I found a long thorn run up into the pad. It took me a minute or two to grip it and pull it out, while Sigurd, wincing a little but with full confidence in my surgery, waited as patiently as a boy when a ball game is on. When the thorn was drawn, he gave one flying lick to his foot and another to my hand—"Much obliged, but you might have been quicker about it"—and bounded back to his play with puppy eagerness.

We had made all possible arrangements for his comfort, boarding him still at his home where three of the household remained with the new tenants, but he was no longer the Lord of the Scarab. We knew that he would do his golden best and we hoped that in his own sweet wisdom he would realize that love never goes away, but as he watched and searched in vain, week after week and month after month, Sigurd drooped, and grew deaf with listening for voices over sea. Old friends took him on the short walks that sufficed him now and affectionate greetings met him everywhere on campus and on street. He would often be seen napping on one neighborly porch or another, for he dwelt more and more in the dim land of "Nod, the shepherd," consorting with

"His blind old sheep-dog, Slumber-soon."

Housewife Honey-voice gave him true and tender care, and when, on a zero night, she had to deny him the warmth of the Scarab and put him to bed, well tucked up with rugs, in Sigurd's House, she would tell him, for the strengthening of his spirit, that "even Jesus Christ slept in the straw."

For our own part, we tried not to think too much of our forsaken collie, but up in Norway we heard dogs called by his name and even on our housetop promenades in Seville we were reminded of his frolic grace by a scalawag puppy on a neighboring flat roof, a gleeful little gymnast whose joy it was to leap up and jerk the linen off the line. Sigurd's friends and ours wrote to us of his welfare with a cheerfulness that was apt to waver before the end of the paragraph.

"I met him on the campus yesterday," scribbled Nannikachee, "and when I asked him where his professors were, he galloped all over the snow, remembering you as juncos, and on second thought he reared up against an oak and barked up into its branches to scare you out of your holes, convinced that you had come to a bad end and been turned into squirrels. Such are the workings of the mighty mind you two sillies credit him with! He looked as round and yellow as a Thanksgiving pumpkin, but there was something wistful about him, too."

On the twenty-third of May, within a month of our return, Sigurd died. To all his losses had been added, that spring, the loss of College Hall, through whose familiar corridors he had roamed as usual, always seeking, one March afternoon, and which he found the next morning a desolation of blackened walls and blowing ashes. If Sigurd could have counted into the hundreds, he would have known that every girl was safe, but if he could have read in the papers of the quiet self-control with which, roused from their sleep to find the flames crackling about them, they had steadily carried through their fire-drill, formed their lines, waited for the word and gone out in perfect order, he would have been no prouder of them than he always was. Of course his Wellesley girls would behave like that.