Here he found Betty and the Mistress, and at their feet deposited his now rather badly mangled mouse; while Finn, like a big nurse taking pride in the escapades of her charge, stood at one side and smiled, with lolling tongue.

“Oh, what a fearsome beast it is!” laughed Betty, and ran to call the Master.  Then Jan was patted and petted, and told what a fine fellow he was; what a mighty hunter before the Lord; and Finn smiled more broadly than ever.  This over, Jan was taken into the kitchen to be weighed (he being now seven weeks old), and was told in an impressive manner that he was within four ounces of twenty pounds.

“Pretty nearly half-a-pound-a-day increase.  You’ll have to take a cure soon, my friend, if this goes on,” said the Master.

From this time onward many of Jan’s games were sensibly affected by his slaughter of the mouse.  He now treated the big shin-bones that were provided for his delectation as live game of a peculiarly treacherous sort.  He stalked, tracked, hunted, and slew those bones with unerring skill and remarkable daring.  Their tenacity of life was most striking.  There were times when, having slain a bone after a long chase, poor Jan would give way to his natural exhaustion and fall sound asleep with his head pillowed on one end of the apparently well-killed and harmless bone.  Yet as often as not, when he would wake, perhaps a quarter of an hour later, this same bone would once more betray its desperate and treacherous vitality by means of an attempt at escape.  So that even in the very moment of waking the dauntless Jan would be obliged to growl fiercely and plunge straightway into hard fighting again.

His first real bark was another dazzling experience.  It came in his eleventh week, when he was as heavy as two terriers, though still somewhat shapeless, and gristly, rather than bony, as to his limbs.  Colonel Forde walked into the garden one afternoon, followed very sedately by the Lady Desdemona, now sleek and shining, and more aristocratic-looking than ever.  Jan was dozing in the front porch, and Finn away somewhere in the orchard.  Jan sprang rashly to his feet and, losing his balance, rolled over.  Rising again, with more of caution and considerable anger, he took a good look at the visitors, and glared with special severity at Desdemona, who serenely ignored his existence.

Then, bracing himself firmly against the door-jamb, Jan opened his jaws and—­barked.  But the novelty of the performance, superimposed upon the concussion and the exertion involved, was too much for his stability, and with one prolonged but unsuccessful effort to hold on to his dignity Jan rolled over on the side farthest from the door-jamb.  It was not to be denied, however, that he had barked; and the strange sound—­it was part bark, part growl, and in part a bloodhound’s bay—­brought Finn from the near-by orchard, and Betty Murdoch from the morning-room, and the Master from his study, and the Persian cat from her perch on the hall mantelshelf; so Master Black-and-Gray had no lack of audience, and, indeed, received an almost embarrassing amount of congratulation, in the course of which he made shift to get a good sniff at Desdemona’s legs and satisfy himself that she was art inoffensive person.