In the frivolous days of her youth she had snapped at the knickerbockers of a chubby errand boy, and been promptly handed over for punishment. But she broke from the executioner under the indignity of the first stroke, and fled for refuge to her master’s bedroom, from which no efforts could dislodge her. So, making the best of a bad business, he took to his bed too for company’s sake. Judy was deeply touched by this practical sympathy, and it formed, I believe, the historic ground-work of their life-long friendship. Her pedigree was mixed. Her father was a white English terrier of unimpeachable breed, who lived a sober, self-contained existence, with no friend but the postman, whom he followed conscientiously on all his rounds of delivery. Her mother was the daughter of a “King Charles,” who had been woo’d and won by a fox. Fair and frail, she was careless of the duties of life, and passed her time in eating and sleeping, sleeping and eating—she is sleeping and eating still, the latter with an ever increasing appetite as the time at her disposal grows less. Judy repudiated _in toto_ her maternal parentage, and reproduced all the best characteristics of her father, combined with a brilliant intelligence, and a far wider appreciation of the sympathies of life. Her minor peculiarities were borrowed from those of a cat. She sat like a cat, pounced like a cat, and washed her face like a cat, using either or both of her paws with a truly feline indifference. She could climb bushes, too, hanging on by her teeth, to the detriment of any unwary fledgling who presumed over confidently upon the limitation of natural gifts. Judy often came on a visit to Thorpe Hill, where she regularly spent an hour after dinner in digging at the root of a favourite beech tree, with the energy of a dog that is close on a prize. From which I inferred that she was a truffle-terrier in disguise, who would make all our fortunes, and set Matthew to dig in her place till he blasphemed against Judy and the truffles and me. But Matthew didn’t put his heart into his work, or realise the fact that Judy’s credit was at stake. And I always believed in her more than I did in him. Later on she justified my confidence—not, I admit, by a discovery of truffles, but (better still) of a full-grown Roman or Anglo-Saxon, crouching among his household divinities. Judy was complacently proud of him as a very superior find, in spite of Matthew’s sneer, “Tweren’t triffles, _I_ knowed,” and forthwith transferred her attentions to a neighbouring tree, under which, for all I know, others of his family may still be reposing. It is humbling to admit that she was wholly devoid of tricks, properly so called: partly because no one had troubled to teach her any, and partly, I think, because she accounted it a waste of time to try and acquire them. No one who studied her thoughtful little face could doubt that she held higher and more recondite theories of the responsibilities of life.