summer morning, when Morris, our old negro man, buried him, and we felt
sympathetic for Morris that the sad job should fall upon him, for Morris
loved him just as we did. Perhaps if we had loved him less, more
sentimentally than deeply, we should have indulged in some sort of
appropriate ceremonial, and marked his grave with a little stone. But,
as I have said, his grave, like that of the great prophet, is a secret
to this day. None of us has ever asked Morris about it, and his grief
has been as reticent as our own. I wondered the other night, as I walked
the garden in a veiled moonlight, whether it was near the lotus-tanks he
was lying--for I remembered how he would stand there, almost by the
hour, watching the goldfish that we had engaged to protect us against
mosquitoes, moving mysteriously under the shadows of the great flat
leaves. In his short life he grew to understand much of this strange
world, but he never got used to those goldfish; and often I have seen
him, after a long wistful contemplation of them, turn away with a sort
of half-frightened, puzzled bark, as though to say that he gave it up.
Or, does he lie, I wonder, somewhere among the long grass of the
salt-marsh, that borders our garden, and in perigee tides widens out
into a lake. There indeed would be his appropriate country, for there
was the happy hunting-ground through which in life he was never tired of
roaming, in the inextinguishable hope of mink, and with the occasional
certainty of a water-rat.

He had come to us almost as mysteriously as he went away; a fox-terrier
puppy wandered out of the Infinite to the neighbourhood of our ice-box,
one November morning, and now wandered back again. Technically, he was
just graduating out of puppyhood, though, like the most charming human
beings, he never really grew up, and remained, in behaviour and
imagination, a puppy to the end. He was a dog of good breed and good
manners, evidently with gentlemanly antecedents canine and human. There