How Rowdy admired him! Rowdy, too, was a greyhound, but poor, silly, stupid old Rowdy’s escutcheon was simply a grille of bars sinister. His humble, self-sacrificing attachment to Spy was as if he appreciated that Spy was the real thing, and that he was only a clumsy imitation. Spy was kind to him; at times it seemed to me that Rowdy’s society even mildly amused him, but his kindness was unmistakably that of royalty for some lowly and devoted dependent. Rowdy once chewed the front cover of the book that, in those days, I cared for more than any other: “Sir Edward Seaward’s Narrative,” by Jane Porter. My youthful fury was extreme when I found the mutilated volume on the piazza, but even at that immature epoch my emotions were hopelessly mixed. I longed to whip Rowdy, because it seemed to me that my favorite book was ruined, but when he came up to me with every appearance of having forgotten the incident, I could only pat his head, as usual. His vandalism brought tears to my eyes, and, after twenty-three years, when I now and then look at the chewed, blue cover of “Sir Edward Seaward’s Narrative,” and examine the little tooth marks, tears still sometimes come, but they aren’t the same kind. And now they are all asleep under the frost-bitten hollyhocks, which I have turned to look at more than once since I sat down to write. Boozy’s life, his dignified old age, and his death are, somehow, too recent to speak of. I should like to, but I can’t. LITTLE PICTURES OF PEOPLE I MR. AND MRS. PARKE They both looked older than their years, which were respectively sixty and fifty-seven, and this was largely due to the ingrowing life they had always led, the influence of their fine old house on Beacon Hill, and to the individuality, the eccentricity, of Mrs. Parke’s clothes. The house was of mellowed red brick, with large, square, high rooms containing, one was at first inclined to think, very little besides dignity and refined sunlight. But a more careful inspection while waiting for Mrs. Parke to come down disclosed a rare combination of comfort and beauty. The sitting room in which she and Mr. Parke usually received one belonged to no period and had no “color scheme.” It was merely quietly perfect with mahogany, with harmonious chintz, with a few very authentic and interesting pictures, such as an early painting, remarkably definite, even a little hard, by Corot, a religious arrangement of archaic reds and blues by Rossetti, some exquisitely painstaking botanical and architectural pencil sketches by Ruskin, and a panel by Whistler that one felt to be important without, however, knowing just what it was intended to represent. In the center of the room was a large, round, bare mahogany table with books arranged on it, exactly half a foot away from the edge, in a circle. Inside the circle was always a great crystal bowl full of flowers that were sent into town every morning from the Parkes’ country place.