I am afraid that the bait thus ingenuously thrown out had a good deal to do with our ultimate yielding.  However, the reports of those who visited Bones were wonderful and marvelous.  He was residing there in state, lying on rugs in the drawing-room, coiled up under the judicial desk in the judge’s study, sleeping regularly on the mat outside Miss Pinkey’s bedroom door, or lazily snapping at flies on the judge’s lawn.

“He’s as yaller as ever,” said one of our informants, “but it don’t somehow seem to be the same back that we used to break clods over in the old time, just to see him scoot out of the dust.”

And now I must record a fact which I am aware all lovers of dogs will indignantly deny, and which will be furiously bayed at by every faithful hound since the days of Ulysses.  Bones not only forgot, but absolutely cut us!  Those who called upon the judge in “store clothes” he would perhaps casually notice, but he would sniff at them as if detecting and resenting them under their superficial exterior.  The rest he simply paid no attention to.  The more familiar term of “Bonesy”—­formerly applied to him, as in our rare moments of endearment—­produced no response.  This pained, I think, some of the more youthful of us; but, through some strange human weakness, it also increased the camp’s respect for him.  Nevertheless, we spoke of him familiarly to strangers at the very moment he ignored us.  I am afraid that we also took some pains to point out that he was getting fat and unwieldy, and losing his elasticity, implying covertly that his choice was a mistake and his life a failure.

A year after, he died, in the odor of sanctity and respectability, being found one morning coiled up and stiff on the mat outside Miss Pinkey’s door.  When the news was conveyed to us, we asked permission, the camp being in a prosperous condition, to erect a stone over his grave.  But when it came to the inscription we could only think of the two words murmured to him by Miss Pinkey, which we always believe effected his conversion: 

“Good Dog!”

A MOTHER OF FIVE

She was a mother—­and a rather exemplary one—­of five children, although her own age was barely nine.  Two of these children were twins, and she generally alluded to them as “Mr. Amplach’s children,” referring to an exceedingly respectable gentleman in the next settlement who, I have reason to believe, had never set eyes on her or them.  The twins were quite naturally alike—­having been in a previous state of existence two ninepins—­and were still somewhat vague and inchoate below their low shoulders in their long clothes, but were also firm and globular about the head, and there were not wanting those who professed to see in this an unmistakable resemblance to their reputed father.  The other children were dolls of different ages, sex, and condition, but the twins may be said to have been distinctly her own conception.  Yet such was her admirable and impartial maternity that she never made any difference between them.  “The Amplach’s children” was a description rather than a distinction.