“A dog!” he said to himself, taking it up carefully.  It was a setter with a front paw raised as though it sighted game.  Alfred stroked its back and felt its muzzle.  Then he pushed it along the polished table, and thought of all the things he could make it do, if only he had it for a bit.  He put it down, patted its head again with his cold hand, and took up the plan.  But somehow the dog suddenly looked at him with a friendly smile, and seemed to move its tail and silky ears.  He caught it up, glanced round, slipped it up his waistcoat, and ran as hard as he could go.

“Thank you my boy,” said the superintendent, taking the plan.  “You’ve not been here long, have you?”

“Oh yes, sir, a tremenjus long time!” said Alfred, shaking all over, whilst the dog’s paw kept scratching through his shirt.

“My memory isn’t what it was,” sighed the superintendent to himself, and he thought of the days when he had struggled to learn the name at least of every boy in his charge.

That afternoon Alfred went into school filled with mixed shame, apprehension, and importance, such as Eve might have felt if she could have gone back to a girls’ school with the apple.  Lessons began with a “combined recitation” from Shakespeare.

“Now,” said the teacher, “go on at ‘Mercy on me.’”

“‘Methinks nobody should be sad but I,’” shouted seventy mouths, opening like one in a unison of sing-song.

“Now, you there!” cried the teacher.  “You with your hand up your waistcoat!  You’re not attending.  Go on at ‘Only for wantonness.’”

“‘By my Christendom,’” Alfred blurted out, almost bringing dog and all to light in his terror: 

  “’So I were out of prison and kept sheep,
  I should be merry as the day is long. 
  And so I should be here, but that I doubt—­’”

“That’ll do,” said the teacher, “Now attend.”

The seventy joined in with “My uncle practises,” and Alfred turned from red to white.

At tea the table jammed the hidden dog against his chest.  When he sought relief by sitting back over the form, Clem corrected the irregular posture with a pin.  At bedtime he undressed in terror lest the creature should jump out and patter on the boards as live things will.  But at last the gas was turned off at the main, and he cautiously groped for his pet among his little heap of clothes under the bed.  That night Clem’s most outrageous story could not attract him.  He roamed Elysian fields with his dog.  Like all toys, it was something better than alive.  And certainly no mortal setter ever played so many parts.  It hunted rats up the nightgown sleeves, and caught burglars by the throat as they stole into bed.  It tracked murderers over the sheet’s pathless waste.  It coursed deer up and down the hills and valleys of his knees.  It drove sheep along the lanes of the striped blanket.  It rescued drowning sailors from the vasty deep around the bed.  It dug out frozen travellers from the snowdrifts of the pillow.  And at last it slept soundly, kennelled between two warm hands, and continued its adventures in dreams.