Ah! and there was that other time, when it was reported to me, returning home at night, that he had gone out to find me; and I went forth again, disturbed, and whistling his special call to the empty fields.  Suddenly out of the darkness I heard a rushing, and he came furiously dashing against my heels from he alone knew where he had been lurking and saying to himself:  I will not go in till he comes!  I could not scold, there was something too lyrical in the return of that live, lonely, rushing piece of blackness through the blacker night.  After all, the vagary was but a variation in his practice when one was away at bed-time, of passionately scratching up his bed in protest, till it resembled nothing; for, in spite of his long and solemn face and the silkiness of his ears, there was much in him yet of the cave bear—­he dug graves on the smallest provocations, in which he never buried anything.  He was not a “clever” dog; and guiltless of all tricks.  Nor was he ever “shown.”  We did not even dream of subjecting him to this indignity.  Was our dog a clown, a hobby, a fad, a fashion, a feather in our caps that we should subject him to periodic pennings in stuffy halls, that we should harry his faithful soul with such tomfoolery?  He never even heard us talk about his lineage, deplore the length of his nose, or call him “clever-looking.”  We should have been ashamed to let him smell about us the tar-brush of a sense of property, to let him think we looked on him as an asset to earn us pelf or glory.  We wished that there should be between us the spirit that was between the sheep dog and that farmer, who, when asked his dog’s age, touched the old creature’s head, and answered thus:  “Teresa” (his daughter) “was born in November, and this one in August.”  That sheep dog had seen eighteen years when the great white day came for him, and his spirit passed away up, to cling with the wood-smoke round the dark rafters of the kitchen where he had lain so vast a time beside his master’s boots.  No, no!  If a man does not soon pass beyond the thought “By what shall this dog profit me?” into the large state of simple gladness to be with dog, he shall never know the very essence of that companion ship which depends not on the points of dog, but on some strange and subtle mingling of mute spirits.  For it is by muteness that a dog becomes for one so utterly beyond value; with him one is at peace, where words play no torturing tricks.  When he just sits, loving, and knows that he is being loved, those are the moments that I think are precious to a dog; when, with his adoring soul coming through his eyes, he feels that you are really thinking of him.  But he is touchingly tolerant of one’s other occupations.  The subject of these memories always knew when one was too absorbed in work to be so close to him as he thought proper; yet he never tried to hinder or distract, or asked for attention.  It dinged his mood, of course, so that the red under his eyes and the folds of his crumply cheeks—­which seemed to speak of a touch of bloodhound introduced a long way back into his breeding—­drew deeper and more manifest.  If he could have spoken at such times, he would have said:  “I have been a long time alone, and I cannot always be asleep; but you know best, and I must not criticise.”