Lad refused to eat a mouthful of the tempting breakfast set before him that day. He could not eat, when foreboding was hot in his throat. He had often ridden in the car. Usually he enjoyed the ride; but now he crawled rather than sprang into the tonneau. All the way up the drive, his great mournful eyes were turned back toward the house in dumb appeal. Every atom of spirit and gayety and dash were gone from him. He knew he was being taken away from the sweet Place he loved, and that the car was whizzing him along toward some dreaded fate. His heart was sick within him. To the born and bred show-dog this is an everyday occurrence--painful, but inevitable. To a chum-dog like Lad, it is heartbreaking. The big collie buried his head in the Mistress' lap and crouched hopelessly at her feet as the car chugged cityward. A thoroughly unhappy dog is the most thoroughly unhappy thing on earth. All the adored Mistress' coaxings and pettings could not rouse Lad from his dull apathy of despair. This was the hour when he was wont to make his stately morning rounds of The Place, at the heels of one of his two deities. And now, instead, these deities were carrying him away to something direfully unpleasant. A lesser dog would have howled or would have struggled crazily to break away. Lad stood his ground like a furry martyr, and awaited his fate. In an hour or so the ride ended. The car drew up at Madison Square--beside the huge yellowish building, arcaded and Diana-capped, which goes by the name of "Garden" and which is as nearly historic as any landmark in feverish New York is permitted to be. Ever since the car had entered Manhattan Island, unhappy Lad's nostrils had been aquiver with a million new and troublous odors. Now, as the car halted, these myriad strange smells were lost in one--an all-pervasive scent of dog. To a human, out there in the street, the scent was not observable. To a dog it was overwhelming. Lad, at the Master's word, stepped down from the tonneau onto the sidewalk. He stood there, dazedly sniffing. The plangent roar of the city was painful to his ears, which had always been attuned to the deep silences of forest and lake. And through this din he caught the muffled noise of the chorused barks and howls of many of his own kind. The racket that bursts so deafeningly on humans as they enter the Garden, during a dog-show, was wholly audible to Lad out in the street itself. And, as instinct or scent makes a hog flinch at going into a slaughterhouse, so the gallant dog's spirit quailed for a moment as he followed the Mistress and the Master into the building.