Old Earth is fair enough for me ordinarily, and she is passing fair to-day. But even the dog, for all his appetite and growing years, is not always satisfied with bread and play. He clings closer than ever to me, as if sometimes frightened at inner voices calling him, which, like deep waters, seem to widen between us, and which no love, though pure and immeasurable, may be able to cross. He is nothing uncommon as a dog, except in the size of his spirit and the quality of his love. He will tackle anything, from a railroad train to a buzzing bumble-bee, that he imagines has intentions inimical to me; and there is nothing on the move, either coming or going, quite innocent of such intentions. Without fear, or awe, or law, he wears his collar, and his license number, 66, but not as a sign of bondage, for that sign he wears all over his alert and fearless front. He growls in his sleep before the fire at ghosts of things that have designs against the house; he risks his life all day long. But he reserves a portion of his soul. He will deliberately chew off his leash at night, and, making sure that nothing stirs about the helpless house, will steal away to the woods, where he hears the baying of some spectral pack down the forest’s high-arched halls. I do not know what the little cross-bred terrier is hunting along the frosted paths--fox or rabbit or wild mice; I cannot run the cold trails that are so warm to his nose; but far ahead of his nose lope two panting hearts, his and mine, following the Gleam. All dogs are dreamers, travelers by twilight, who wander toward a slow deferring dawn. They cannot see in the white fire of noon. A lovelier light, diffused and dim with dusk, is in the eyes of dogs and all dumb creatures, through which they watch a world of shadows moving with them like lantern-lighted shapes at night upon a wall. “Not of the sunlight, Not of the moonlight, Not of the starlight,” is the tender, troubled light in the eyes of dogs. There is a deposit, an infinitesimal deposit, it may be, of the radium of romance in the slag of all souls. Call it by other names--optimism, idealism, religion--you still leave it undefined; an inherent, essential element, harder to separate from the spiritual dross of us than radium from its carnotite; a kind of atomic property of the spirit which breaks up its substance; which ionizes, energizes, and illumines it. There may be souls that never knew its power, but I can hardly think there ever was a soul shut in a cave so darksome, that romance never entered with its touch of radiance, if only as “A little glooming light, much like a shade.”