How did I come by Fussie?  I went to Newmarket with Rosa Corder, whom Whistler painted.  She was one of those plain-beautiful women who are so far more attractive than some of the pretty ones.  She had wonderful hair—­like a fair, pale veil, a white, waxen face, and a very good figure; and she wore very odd clothes.  She had a studio in Southampton Row, and another at Newmarket where she went to paint horses.  I went to Cambridge once and drove back with her across the heath to her studio.

“How wonderfully different are the expressions on terriers’ faces,” I said to her, looking at a painting of hers of a fox-terrier pup.  “That’s the only sort of dog I should like to have.”

“That one belonged to Fred Archer,” Rosa Corder said.  “I daresay he could get you one like it.”

We went out to find Archer.  Curiously enough I had known the famous jockey at Harpenden when he was a little boy, and I believe used to come round with vegetables.

“I’ll send you a dog, Miss Terry, that won’t be any trouble.  He’s got a very good head, a first-rate tail, stuck in splendidly, but his legs are too long.  He’d follow you to America!”

Prophetic words!  On one of our departures for America, Fussie was left behind by mistake at Southampton.  He could not get across the Atlantic, but he did the next best thing.  He found his way back from there to his own theater in the Strand, London!

Fred Archer sent him originally to the stage-door at the Lyceum.  The man who brought him out from there to my house in Earl’s Court said: 

“I’m afraid he gives tongue, Miss.  He don’t like music, anyway.  There was a band at the bottom of your road, and he started hollering.”

We were at luncheon when Fussie made his debut into the family circle, and I very quickly saw his stomach was his fault.  He had a great dislike to “Charles I.”; we could never make out why.  Perhaps it was because Henry wore armor in one act—­and Fussie may have barked his shins against it.  Perhaps it was the firing off of the guns; but more probably it was because the play once got him into trouble.  As a rule Fussie had the most wonderful sense of the stage, and at rehearsal would skirt the edge of it, but never cross it.  But at Brooklyn one night when we were playing “Charles I.”—­the last act, and that most pathetic part of it where Charles is taking a last farewell of his wife and children—­Fussie, perhaps excited by his run over the bridge from New York, suddenly bounded on to the stage!  The good children who were playing Princess Mary and Prince Henry didn’t even smile; the audience remained solemn, but Henry and I nearly went into hysterics.  Fussie knew directly that he had done wrong.  He lay down on his stomach, then rolled over on his back, whimpering an apology—­while carpenters kept on whistling and calling to him from the wings.  The children took him up to the window at the back of the scene, and he stayed there cowering between them until the end of the play.