Waddles was liberal minded upon such matters--as liberal as the law allows. Dog law says that no dog shall dig up a bone that another has buried; but all bones that lie abandoned and uncovered are public property and fair eating. Waddles, being affluent, never ate swill, and only buried special bones to ripen, casting others about at random, often with scraps of flesh ungnawed; for this he was regarded in Dogtown as the people’s friend. Lily, in coming, stopped this patronage. She had known want herself, in the days when she tramped with gypsies, so she ranged about, industriously burying everything she found for possible future use, and kept such a strict watch on all the outbuildings that the most ravenous cur dared not steal a lap of sour milk from the pig’s trough for fear of seeing those wide jaws gnashing in front of him; for Lily had the one bad trait of her race: she laid hold without warning. So after all it was only Tommy who grieved for Lily. To him she stood for property rights, strength, and friendship, and for a time he was inconsolable. [Illustration] “Let’s come home and see the twins have their supper; it won’t do any good for you to stay here and cry. Your eyes are swelled up like a frog’s, now,” said Anne, trying to lead Tommy away after Baldy and his shovel had disappeared. “Supposin’ it was Waddles was dead, would you stop cryin’--the very same day--even if you were frogs?” “Waddles! why that is entirely different; he is a _person_. There is _no_ other dog like him,” and then Anne sat down suddenly on the tumble-down stone fence in sheer amazement at the possibility of mischance overtaking her little friend. A friend he was, and she was entirely right--there was no other quite like him among sturdy, self-reliant, gentlemen dogs. He had been so long the companion of the House People that, without being of the objectionable, pampered, perfumed, spoon-fed type of lap dog who demands the care that a child alone should have, he really seemed to be, as Anne said, a person. Waddles did not know a single taught trick; he could not hold sugar on his nose, like Miss Letty’s poodle, Hamlet; he could not sit up and beg, though he had a language of his own, part gesture, part speech, by which he could ask for anything that he could not get without aid. In his frisky youth even he scorned the mere idea of jumping through a hoop, or the poodle trick of “saying his prayers.” Yet there were few walls that he could not manage to get over or through, and he would put his paws upon his mistress’s knees and gaze into her face in unmistakable supplication. “It’s a great responsibility having a dog like Waddles,” Anne had said one day, shortly after her brother was born, when she had given him half of her name, and stopped being Tommy-Anne, and there had been much talk about her new responsibility. “Do you know, mother, I believe Waddles thinks that I’m God, and it will be dreadful if I’m unkind and disappoint him.”