_On the way his dog began to fight with mine_. This bit of news is simply announced. It seems at first to be of slight importance. A bad thing nevertheless,--a dog fight in a little town. What! you don’t know that? You have never lived in the country? A dog fight is a matter of special gravity. The masters intervene, they take sides, and the defeated one swears that the matter shall not end here. Whole families have been embroiled through a dog fight. What was the origin of the enmity between the Montagus and the Capulets? Perhaps a dog fight. And just this way our Father Gregory undertakes to interfere; his dog is getting the worst of it, rolled in the dust as a dumpling in flour. _Father Gregory, trying to part them, tumbles, nose first, in the filth_. He rushes to the rescue with uplifted cane, his foot slips, and behold him on the ground in a lamentable posture, especially his nose, having made a most unlucky choice of a spot upon which to fall. At this point it is proper to assume a melancholy tone, the apostrophe which follows reaching a note of heart-rending grief. _Poor Father Gregory_! A pause. He is to be pitied, for his misfortune is great. But suddenly, pity becomes sarcasm, pointing to his pride. _See his bunch of poppies, far from his hat_! The emblems of his vanity are soiled. He himself may go home, and wash and brush himself, but he can never use the poppies again, and but for them nothing would have happened to him. I attribute Father Gregory to Aunt Deen because of the fertility of her imagination, which daily provided her with new stories for our delectation. Grown persons are not often on a level with children: they take too low a place. Aunt Deen had an instinct for what was suited to us. Her stories kept us breathless. When I try to rescue them from the past, for her credit, they fly before me, smiling. “No, no,” they say--for I get close to them, only between us is a great chasm, deep, though not wide, which is the common grave of all my vanished years--“what is the use? You can never do anything with us. See: we have taken the colour of that time: how are you to describe that?” When grandfather came upon us sitting in a circle around our story-teller, he would shake his head disapprovingly. “_Fiddle-faddles_”, he would murmur; “_fiddle-faddles_. One owes it to children to tell them the truth.” We would ask Aunt Deen what _fiddle-faddles_ were, and she would answer, by way of getting her revenge, “It’s what one does when one plays the violin.” Between her songs and grandfather’s violin there was sometimes a deafening discord.