Hardly, however, could the apology have been expressed in words, when up he bounces again to his hind feet and begins executing a series of antics, so fantastic and undog-like that they who witnessed them were quite as much astonished as amused. Jervis Whitney himself, than whom there was not a man in the hunter's paradise more deeply versed in dogs and their ways, and who thought he knew his own dog from head to tail and back again, was even more astonished than the rest. Had old Mother Hubbard and her far-famed dog risen from their honored graves and, presenting themselves before our friends, repeated the dear old programme, from the cupboard so bare, to the bier so sad, with the fruits and the flue, the tripe and the pipe, the wig and the jig, and all the other fondly remembered marvels between--scarcely could the effect have been more startling. Now, Pow-wow's antics on this occasion, unaccountable as they seemed to those who witnessed them, and must seem to the more sober class of my readers, admit of perfectly rational explanation, give them only Manitou ground to rest on. Nick of the Woods and Meg of the Hills, who knew as well as anybody--better, I fear, than many a human body--that there are few things more wholesome for us poor mortals than hearty, unrestrained, unrestrainable, innocent laughter, had decided between them that, in order to put his case beyond all human or superhuman possibility of relapse, Sprigg should have some hearty laughter. Accordingly, they had sent one of their dog-robed, dog-natured elves to tinker and conjure with Pow-wow's tail, and through that sensitive member, as a medium, telegraph, as it were, such fancies to his sober old noddle as should, for a brief space, set him quite beside himself. In other words, set him to acting the human, according to the monkey conception of the character. A conception so nearly suits an occasional specimen of the model race as scarcely to be deemed caricature.