There was a little artificial water-lily pool on The Place, perhaps four feet deep.  By actual count, Bruce fell into it no less than nine times in a single week.  Once or twice he had nearly drowned there before some member of the family chanced to fish him out.  And, learning nothing from experience, he would fall in again, promptly, the next day.

The Master at last rigged up a sort of sloping wooden platform, running from the lip of the pool into the water, so that Bruce could crawl out easily, next time he should tumble in.  Bruce watched the placing of this platform with much grave interest.  The moment it was completed, he trotted down it on a tour of investigation.  At its lower edge he slipped and rolled into the pool.  There he floundered, with no thought at all of climbing out as he had got in, until the Master rescued him and spread a wire net over the whole pool to avert future accidents.

Thenceforth, Bruce met with no worse mischance, there, than the perpetual catching of his toe-pads in the meshes of the wire.  Thus ensnared he would stand, howling most lamentably, until his yells brought rescue.

Though the pool could be covered with a net, the wide lake at the foot of the lawn could not be.  Into the lake Bruce would wade till the water reached his shoulders.  Then with a squeal of venturesome joy, he would launch himself outward for a swim; and, once facing away from shore, he never had sense enough to turn around.

After a half-hour of steady swimming, his soft young strength would collapse.  A howl of terror would apprise the world at large that he was about to drown.  Whereat some passing boatman would pick him up and hold him for ransom, or else some one from The Place must jump into skiff or canoe and hie with all speed to the rescue.  The same thing would be repeated day after day.

The local S.P.C.A. threatened to bring action against the Master for letting his dog risk death, in this way, from drowning.  Morbidly, the Master wished the risk might verge into a certainty.

The puppy’s ravenous appetite was the wonder of all.  He stopped eating only when there was nothing edible in reach.  And as his ideas of edible food embraced everything that was chewable,—­from bath-towels to axle-grease—­he was seldom fasting and was frequently ill.

Nature does more for animals than for humans.  By a single experience she warns them, as a rule, what they may safely eat and what they may not.  Bruce was the exception.  He would pounce upon and devour a luscious bit of laundry-soap with just as much relish as though a similar bit of soap had not made him horribly sick the day before.

Once he munched, relishfully, a two-pound box of starch, box and all; on his recovery, he began upon a second box, and was unhappy when it was taken from him.

He would greet members of the family with falsetto-thunderous barks of challenge as they came down the drive from the highway.  But he would frisk out in joyous welcome to meet and fawn upon tramps or peddlers who sought to invade The Place.  He could scarce learn his own name.  He could hardly be taught to obey the simplest command.  As for shaking hands or lying down at order (those two earliest bits of any dog’s education), they meant no more to Bruce than did the theory of quadratic equations.