"Not much!" answered Mr. Nimrod, promptly. "I never could break him in then. He has run away twice already, and both times I followed him and found him hanging around the house you moved from. Lucky the trail was cold. If he once finds out where you are, the jig's up." When Julius came home at noon, we sat at the table listless and dejected, now and then making fitful attempts to converse. The dainty noon meal had suddenly lost flavor after we had exchanged a few sentences about "Poor, hungry Bruno!" Were we to eat, drink, and be merry, while our faithful friend starved for love of us! After Julius had returned to the office, there was such a tugging at my heart-strings that I--well, yes, I did, I cried! How I regretted that I had never cultivated an intimacy with Mrs. Nimrod, so that I might have "run in" to call, and thus have an opportunity to comfort the poor homesick fellow! Julius saw the tear-traces when he returned towards evening, and proposed a stroll down town; thinking, I suppose, that if we sat at home we should be sure to talk of Bruno and be melancholy. We walked through all the principal streets of the town, meeting and greeting friends and acquaintances, stopping to glance at new goods in several of the shops; bringing up at last in the town's largest bookstore. [Illustration: "I fell on my knees to hug him."--PAGE 25.] We were just starting for home, when on the sidewalk there was a sudden flurry and dash, and Bruno, stomach to earth, was crawling about us, uttering yelps and whines that voiced a joy so great it could not be told from mortal agony. Regardless of the fact that we were on the most public thoroughfare of the town, I fell on my knees to hug him, and could not keep back tears of mingled joy and pain. His poor thin sides! His gasps of rapture! Oh, Boonie, Boonie! The first excitement over, we looked about us for Mr. Nimrod. He was nowhere to be seen. Bruno had evidently escaped, and was running away to look for us when he had chanced to strike our trail and so had found us. We were glad he was alone. We both felt that if he had been torn from us at that supreme moment he would have died; he was so faint with fasting and grief, and then the overwhelming joy at finding those he had thought to be forever lost to him! He squeezed himself in between us, and kept step as we went homeward in the gathering twilight. As soon as we reached home, we hurried him to the kitchen to enjoy the sight of the poor fellow at his trencher. How we fed him! I ransacked the pantry for the things he liked best, till his sides began to swell visibly. He paused between mouthfuls to feast his loving eyes on first one, then the other of us, and his tail never once stopped wagging. Rebecca came purring in to rub against his legs, and even submitted with shut eyes to a kiss from his big wet tongue. He must have felt that such an hour repaid him for all his sufferings.