The whole scene, as the cooks moved actively about upon the lawn, and children romped round the fires, and settlers came flocking through the forests, might have recalled the revelry of merry England in the olden time, though the costumes of the far west were perhaps somewhat different from those of old England.

No one of all the band assembled there on that day of rejoicing required to ask what it was all about.  Had any one been in doubt for a moment, a glance at the centre 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 clenched 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 held forth on the predicament 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 around him; but if for a moment he permitted his eye to rest on the countenance of Grumps, that creature’s tail became suddenly 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 amiable way in which Crusoe put up with it.  We say put up with it advisedly, because it must have been a very great inconvenience to him, seeing that if he attempted to move, his satellite moved in front of him, so that his only way of escaping temporarily was by jumping over Grumps’s head.