All Sister Bailey’s dogs, and a great many more, converged upon the beach when Fritz swam ashore and shook himself free from such marine algae as he might have collected on his course. We kept Fritz close at heel, but there were constant alarums and incursions. As we sauntered along the shore path by the fish-flakes where the women were turning over the fish under the threat of rain, Fritz was in a measure taken into the loosely cohesive _plunderbund_ of Sister Bailey’s pack. They seemed to be saying to him after their fashion: “Oh, well, you are a foreigner from that ship out yonder in the cove, to be sure, but here we are passing one hostile tribe after another, and we may need you any time to help us out in a scrap, so you may as well travel along with our bushy tails—though yours points toward the ground, and you can’t be very much of a dog, after all.” For dogs appeared in squads, platoons, companies, battalions, even as iron-filings cluster to a magnet. There was a most outrageous and unholy pow-wow when we had gone about five houses from the beach. All the dogs from near and far piled into it like hornets from a broken nest. There was no speech nor language known to dogdom in which their voices were not heard with howls and imprecations. Alas! even the gentle Sister Bailey had to abandon for the nonce her policy of moral suasion and get in among her protégés with thwackings of a bit of driftwood and a few well-directed pushes (not to say kicks) of the foot. Any moderate impact, when a scrap is in full swing, rebounds from the tough integuments like hailstones landing on a tin roof. Even an every-day argument of these beasts sounds like wholesale murder. It is a pathetic fact that with all the affectionate responsiveness of some of the animals to human notice there always lurks a danger. If you are a stranger, meeting a strange pack, it is well to keep your eyes upon them, and if you have not a stick in your hand, or a stone ready to throw, it is wholesome to stoop groundward and pretend you have a missile. Then, nine times out of ten, they will scatter. So often one would like to believe they are all dog, with all of the dog’s graces and goodnesses—but there reigns in the breast of each a vulpine jealousy that easily and instantly mounts to a blood-heat of maddened fury. Dogs of the same litter will fight as furiously and savagely as born enemies, though they may recognize in the traces intuitively the leadership of their mother at an age far beyond that at which civilized puppies become as contemptuous of their mother as she is of them.