Such hunting was wearing to a heavy dog past middle age like Mr. Wolf, and after each run that season he rested longer, and felt less appetite for his good dinner and go-to-bed bone. In dog friendships, like those of people, there should be a certain amount of physical as well as mental equality, or one will lead the other beyond his strength, and this is what Quick did to his dear friends, as both Mr. Wolf and Waddles would often have continued to doze under the stone wall, and let certain signs of game pass unnoticed if Quick had not literally burrowed them out and nagged them into action, saying, both Miss Jule and Anne suspected, many taunting things that no old dog likes to hear from his juniors. Miss Jule noticed that Mr. Wolf was growing rather thin, and she tried to keep him more with her, coaxing him to lie in the hall of afternoons, or by her desk, as he used to even in his youth, before Quick had come to win his friendship and urge him to the hunting for which he was not intended. But the nervous, tireless fox terrier was so persistent, crawling and fawning before the St. Bernard, or even pawing him awake when he slept, that the poor old fellow had little peace. Finally Miss Jule resolved to give Quick to some children living away in another county, who wanted exactly such an active pet, but, as it chanced, she had put it off over long. Early in October a heavy rain flooded the low, river meadows, and turned the muskrat hunting-grounds of Ben Uncas and Co., that before had been merely wet here and there, into a wide pool, where the dogs shorter of leg than Mr. Wolf and Colin were obliged to paddle along. There were already one or two of the muskrats’ winter homes in these meadows. These huts looked like low stacks of coarse hay and reeds, and the odour of the builders was sufficient to provoke the dogs to attack them, even though the entrances ran under ground for some way before opening under water in the river bank, something after the manner of beaver runs, though the beaver’s house is in the water itself, not on partly submerged meadow land. Because the muskrat is a poor runner, it trusts itself on dry land as little as possible, and the dogs hunted it either by digging it from its burrows, the only way in which they had real success, or by swimming after it. This last might do well enough as sport for water dogs on summer evenings, but it was poor work for elderly Mr. Wolf and Colin, with the autumn chill in the air. As for Waddles, he was wise in his own generation, and would no longer even cross a brook where he was obliged to wet more than the tips of his toes, and even did that with a very staccato tread. So when the others spent afternoons splashing about the muskrats’ huts, he, dry and comfortable, merely sat upon a low bridge close by, talked to himself, and occasionally bayed advice. But then, Waddles was a genius. [Illustration: _Ben Uncas._]