He uttered never a word, but his whole mental mechanism was turning somersaults. The next day, at roll-call, that dog was reported among the missing. Benjamin pretended to sympathize and to condole with his wife, but she was disconsolate. Some Gypsies had passed that way during the day, and it was suspected that they might have stolen the dog. The horse was accordingly hitched up and a drive of ten miles was taken. When the Gypsies were overhauled and rounded up, the pug was not discovered. Then an advertisement was inserted in all the town papers. Still no pug. The canine continued a persistent absentee. As a matter of fact, Benjamin had devoted ingenuity enough to the destruction of that dog to form the basis of a Sherlock Holmes detective story. He had prepared a sort of canister-bomb, adapted to go off by a strong thump of any sort. The dog, the bomb and a stout rawhide string, with which to tether the bomb to the dog, were confidingly placed in the hands of a small boy in the neighborhood, known to have both a sense of humor and a taste for the mischievous. The boy was, however, fond of dogs, and it eventuated that he decided to keep the dog for himself. Hence the delay in the finale of this story. But the urchin's sense of humor finally got the better of his affection. He found it impossible to choke off the appeal to his imagination of hitching that bomb to the dog's tail. Consequently he took the pug out and carefully tied the canister to its tail. Following the ingenious instructions of Benjamin, as soon as he had done so he dodged into the house and shut the door before the dog realized what had happened. When the pug discovered itself a part of an infernal machine, old-home-week associations rose up in its memory, and it made a bee-line for home and human mother. Benjamin had made a little miscalculation about the amount of thumping that would be required to actuate the exploding mechanism of his ingenious bomb, and it did not explode immediately, as expected. The dog and bomb, consequently, hurtled through space like a comet with a head on both ends of the tail. On the dog's arrival, Sukyanna was going about her household duties, with a book in one hand written by Miriam Mushroom on The Transcendentalism of the Universal, and Its Relevancy to the Elevation of Womanhood; while, with the other hand, directed only by subconscious mental process born of habit, she was preparing supper for Benjamin. She prided herself on that power of concentration and absorption, so common to the artistic temperament, which can resist for a while the battering-ram assaults on consciousness of howling children, barking dogs, or a house on fire.