Bruce

Excerpt

TO MY TEN BEST FRIENDS:

Who are far wiser in their way and far better in every way, than I; and yet who have not the wisdom to know it

Who do not merely think I am perfect, but who are calmly and permanently convinced of my perfection;—and this in spite of fifty disillusions a day

Who are frantically happy at my coming and bitterly woebegone in my absence

Who never bore me and never are bored by me

Who never talk about themselves and who always listen with rapturous interest to anything I may say

Who, having no conventional standards, have no respectability; and who, having no conventional consciences, have no sins

Who teach me finer lessons in loyalty, in patience, in true courtesy, in unselfishness, in divine forgiveness, in pluck and in abiding good spirits than do all the books I have ever read and all the other models I have studied

Who have not deigned to waste time and eyesight in reading a word of mine and who will not bother to read this verbose tribute to themselves

In short, to the most gloriously satisfactory chums who ever appealed to human vanity and to human desire for companionship

TO OUR TEN SUNNYBANK COLLIES MY STORY IS GRATEFULLY AND AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED

BRUCE

by

CHAPTER I. The Coming Of Bruce

She was beautiful. And she had a heart and a soul—which were a curse. For without such a heart and soul, she might have found the tough life-battle less bitterly hard to fight.

But the world does queer things—damnable things—to hearts that are so tenderly all-loving and to souls that are so trustfully and forgivingly friendly as hers.

Her "pedigree name" was Rothsay Lass. She was a collie—daintily fragile of build, sensitive of nostril, furrily tawny of coat. Her ancestry was as flawless as any in Burke's Peerage.

If God had sent her into the world with a pair of tulip ears and with a shade less width of brain-space she might have been cherished and coddled as a potential bench-show winner, and in time might even have won immortality by the title of "CHAMPION Rothsay Lass."

But her ears pricked rebelliously upward, like those of her earliest ancestors, the wolves. Nor could manipulation lure their stiff cartilages into drooping as bench-show fashion demands. The average show-collie's ears have a tendency to prick. By weights and plasters, and often by torture, this tendency is overcome. But never when the cartilage is as unyielding as was Lass's.

Her graceful head harked back in shape to the days when collies had to do much independent thinking, as sheep-guards, and when they needed more brainroom than is afforded by the borzoi skull sought after by modern bench-show experts.

Wherefore, Lass had no hope whatever of winning laurels in the show-ring or of attracting a high price from some rich fancier. She was tabulated, from babyhood, as a "second"—in other words, as a faulty specimen in a litter that should have been faultless....