His Devotion to His Lovely Lady
First of all the Lovely Lady loves dogs and knows what they think about, and what they like to do, and what they want. Then she has the most enchanting way of talking to you if you are a dog and a little fluffy dog. She has a dance that fills you with pleasure, so that you caper about her in sheer ecstasy of joy. Best of all her possessions, besides her own lovely self, is “Jeems.” Jeems is a terrier too, young, rather rough, but good company for a walk, and since Raggety has licked him into shape by many instructions of what to do and what not to do, administered in the shape of growls, Jeems is really an all-round good dog. When Raggety came to live near to his Lovely Lady and Jeems, he found that of a morning a breakfast with these friends startedthe day satisfactorily. So off he will start with never a thought of “Home and Mother,” when there is the prospect of a ’licious breakfast, to be followed by a walk in the woods.
His marked attentions to his Lovely Lady are witnessed and encouraged by me and by the Lovely Lady’s Husband. Neither of us could be even a tiny bit jealous of the Lovely Lady and her devoted little lover, Raggety. Only recently Raggety showed that it is indeed his Lovely Lady and no one else whom he follows. One unhappy day she packed her trunk and went away for a visit, and during all her absence neither the gambols of Jeems nor the blandishments of the Lovely Lady’s Husband had any effect on his faithful little heart. He simply would not, could not go to that empty house; he stayed away for many days.
And will you tell me how he learnedof the Lovely Lady’s return? He was fast asleep in his little bed at home at the late hour of her arrival. But bright and early the next morning he was at her door greeting her with barks of welcome, ready to go in and have breakfast with her. What or who told him that she was back again? Did some dog friend tell him early in the morning that she had come? Did the fragrance of her presence come to his keen sagacious nostrils? Did some occult sense, denied us human beings, tell him that his loneliness was over, and that his little heart again might beat with joy?