“The first summer which we spent in Lenox we had along a very intelligent dog named Noble. He was learned in many things, and by his dog-lore excited the undying admiration of all the children. But there were some things which Noble could never learn. Having on one occasion seen a red squirrel run into a hole in a stone wall, he could not be persuaded that he was not there for evermore!... “The intense enthusiasm of the dog at that hole can hardly be described. He filled it full of barking. He pawed and scratched as if undermining a bastion. Standing off at a little distance, he would pierce the hole with a gaze as intense and fixed as if he were trying magnetism on it. Then, with tail extended and every hair thereon electrified, he would rush at the empty hole with a prodigious onslaught. “This imaginary squirrel haunted Noble night and day. The very squirrel himself would run up before his face into the tree, and, crouched in a crotch, would sit silently watching the whole process of bombarding the empty hole with great sobriety and relish. But Noble would allow of no doubts. His conviction that that hole had a squirrel in it continued unshaken for six weeks. When all other occupations failed this hole remained to him. When there were no more chickens to harry, no pigs to bite, no cattle to chase, no children to romp with, no expeditions to make with the grown folks, and when he had slept all that his dog-skin would hold, he would walk out of the yard, yawn and stretch himself, and then look wistfully at the hole, as if thinking to himself: ‘Well, as there is nothing else to do, I may as well try that hole again!’ “We had almost forgotten this little trait until the conduct of the New York _Express_ in respect to Colonel Fremont’s religion brought it ludicrously to mind again. Colonel Fremont is, and always has been, as sound a Protestant as John Knox ever was. He was bred in the Protestant faith and has never changed.... “But the _Express_, like Noble, has opened on this hole in the wall, and can never be done barking at it. Day after day it resorts to this empty hole. When everything else fails this resource remains. There they are indefatigably—the _Express_ and Noble—a church without a Fremont, and a hole without a squirrel in it!... “We never read the _Express_ nowadays without thinking involuntarily, ‘Goodness! the dog is letting off at that hole again.’”