"Well, you chaps, what I saw last week down in Kent takes some beating. I'd been sketching in a hay-field, and was just making back along the top hedge to the lane when I heard a sound from the other side like a man's crying. I put my eye to a gap, and there, about three yards in, was a grey-haired bloke in a Norfolk jacket and flannel trousers, digging like a fiend, and crying like a baby--blowing, and gasping and sobbing, tears and sweat rolling down into his beard like rivers. He'd plunge his pick in, scratch, and shovel, and hack at the roots as if for dear life--he was making the hole too close to the hedge, of course--and all the time carrying on like that. I thought he must be digging his own grave at least. Suddenly he put his pick down, and there just under the hedge I saw a dead brown dog, lying on its side, all limp. I never see a dead animal myself, you know, without a bit of a choke; they're so soft, and lissom; the peace, and the pity--a sort of look of: "Why--why--when I was so alive?" Well, this elderly Johnny took a good squint at it, to see if the hole was big enough, then off he went again, sobbing and digging like a fiend. It was really a bit too weird, and I mouched off. But when I'd gone about half a mile, I got an attack of the want-to-knows, came back, and sneaked along the hedge. There he was still, but he had finished, and was having a mop round, and putting the last touches to a heap of stones. I strolled up, and said: 'Hot work, Sir, digging, this weather!' He was a good-looking old grey-beard, with an intellectual face, high forehead and all that. 'I'm not used to it,' he said, looking at his blisters. 'Been burying a dog? Horrid job that!--favourite, I'm afraid.' He seemed in two minds whether to shut me up and move off, but he didn't. 'Yes,' he said; 'it's cut me up horribly. I never condemned a creature to death before. And dogs seem to know.' 'Ah! They're pretty uncanny,' I said, for I wasn't going to let on, of course, that I had seen him.