of other days.  While I was alluding to a circumstance that occurred between me and one of my Belleville neighbors the children cried out with stentorian voice, “Tell us about Carlo and the freezer;” and they kicked the leg of the table, and beat with both hands, and clattered the knives on the plate, until I was compelled to shout, “Silence!  You act like a band of Arabs!  Frank, you had better swallow what you have in your mouth before you attempt to talk.”  Order having been gained, I began: 

We sat in the country parsonage, on a cold winter day, looking out of our back window toward the house of a neighbor.  She was a model of kindness, and a most convenient neighbor to have.  It was a rule between us that when either house was in want of anything it should borrow of the other.  The rule worked well for the parsonage, but rather badly for the neighbor, because on our side of the fence we had just begun to keep house, and needed to borrow everything, while we had nothing to lend, except a few sermons, which the neighbor never tried to borrow, from the fact that she had enough of them on Sundays.  There is no danger that your neighbor will burn a hole in your new brass kettle if you have none to lend.  It will excite no surprise to say that we had an interest in all that happened on the other side of the parsonage fence, and that any injury inflicted on so kind a woman would rouse our sympathy.

On the wintry morning of which we speak our neighbor had been making ice-cream; but there being some defect in the machinery, the cream had not sufficiently congealed, and so she set the can of the freezer containing the luxury on her back steps, expecting the cold air would completely harden it.  What was our dismay to see that our dog Carlo, on whose early education we were expending great care, had taken upon himself the office of ice-cream inspector, and was actually busy with the freezer!  We hoisted the window and shouted at him, but his mind was so absorbed in his undertaking he did not stop to listen.  Carlo was a greyhound, thin, gaunt and long-nosed, and he was already making his way on down toward the bottom of the can.  His eyes and all his head had disappeared in the depths of the freezer.  Indeed, he was so far submerged that when he heard us, with quick and infuriate pace, coming up close behind him, he could not get his head out, and so started with the encumbrance on his head, in what direction he knew not.  No dog was ever in a more embarrassing position—­freezer to the right of him, freezer to the left of him, freezer on the top of him, freezer under him.

So, thoroughly blinded, he rushed against the fence then against the side of the house, then against a tree.  He barked as though he thought he might explode the nuisance with loud sound, but the sound was confined in so strange a speaking-trumpet that he could not have known his own voice.  His way seemed hedged up.  Fright and anger and remorse and shame whirled him about without mercy.