of the crowd assembled round the gate of the western fortress would have quickly enlightened him. For there stood Dick Varley, and his mild-looking mother, and his loving dog Crusoe. There, too, stood Joe Blunt, like a bronzed warrior returned from the fight, turning from one to another as question poured in upon question almost too rapidly to permit of a reply. There, too, stood Henri, making enthusiastic speeches to whoever chose to listen to him—now glaring at the crowd with clinched fists and growling voice, as he told of how Joe and he had been tied hand and foot, and lashed to poles, and buried in leaves, and threatened with a slow death by torture; at other times bursting into a hilarious laugh as he told of Mahtawa, when that wily chief was treed by Crusoe in the prairie.
Young Marston was there, too, hanging about Dick, whom he loved as a brother and regarded as a perfect hero. Grumps, too, was there, and Fan. Do you think, reader, that Grumps looked at any one but Crusoe? If you do, you are mistaken. Grumps on that day became a regular, an incorrigible, utter, and perfect nuisance to everybody—not excepting himself, poor beast. Grumps was a dog of one idea, and that idea was Crusoe. Out of that great idea there grew one little secondary idea, and that idea was that the only joy on earth worth mentioning was to sit on his haunches, exactly six inches from Crusoe’s nose, and gaze steadfastly into his face. Wherever Crusoe went Grumps went. If Crusoe stopped, Grumps was down before him in an instant. If Crusoe bounded away, which in the exuberance of his spirits he often did, Grumps was after him like a bundle of mad hair. He was in everybody’s way, in Crusoe’s way, and being, so to speak, “beside himself,” was also in his own way. If people trod upon him accidentally, which they often did, Grumps uttered a solitary heart-rending yell proportioned in intensity to the excruciating nature of the torture he endured, then instantly resumed his position and his fascinated stare. Crusoe generally held his head up, and gazed over his little friend at what was going on; but if for a moment his eye rested on the countenance of Grumps, that creature’s tail became imbued with an amount of wriggling vitality that seemed to threaten its separation from the body.
It was really quite interesting to watch this unblushing, and disinterested, and utterly reckless display of affection on the part of Grumps, and the way in which Crusoe
