But to return to the breakfast. While we were at the table a hired singer and guitar-player, a young girl of sixteen or seventeen years, sang Italian popular songs and performed instrumental pieces. She had nearly exhausted her list when she began to sing the weird, mournful song of Naples, “Palomella,” at that time quite the rage, but since worn threadbare, and its naïve angles and depressions polished down to the meaningless monotony of a popular ditty. We heard a dog howl in the sleeping-room as the singer finished the ballad, and Lisa rose to open the door. My seat on Tyck’s left brought me quite near the door, and I turned on my chair to watch the entrance of the animal. A black poodle, as near as I could judge the exact counterpart of the Flemish dog, quietly walked into the room, evidently perfectly at home. My first calm reflection was that it was an hallucination, a mental reproduction of one of the grim pictures of the past winter; I could not believe my own vision, and it was some time before I came to realize the fact that my senses were not deceived. I was about to ask Tyck if he had noticed in the dog any curious resemblance to our self-appointed companion in Antwerp, when he turned, and, as I thought then, with a lingering touch of the old superstitious fear in his voice, said: “You’ve noticed the dog; he belongs to Lisa. When he first came here, a month ago, I was horrified to find in him the image of our Flemish friend. Lisa laughed me out of my fears, saying that the animal had been in the family for six months or more, and at last I began to look upon him as a harmless pup, and to wonder only at the strange coincidence.” But I could not turn the affair into a joke or forget for a moment past events, now recalled so vividly to my mind. This was the third time that a black poodle had taken a liking to one of us, and two out of the three attachments had already proved fatal to the human partner. It was not by any means clear that the same dog played these different renderings of one part, but to all appearance it was the identical poodle. If in two cases this friendship of the dog for his self-chosen master had proved fatal, it was but a natural inference that the third attachment would terminate in a similar manner. But Tyck was in better health than ever before, notwithstanding the companionship of the dog. Was not this a proof of the folly of my superstition? I asked myself. Reasons were not wanting to disprove the soundness of my logic. It was undoubtedly true that stranger and more wonderful coincidences had happened, and nothing had come of them, and it was undeniable that the imagination might distort facts to such a degree that coincidences would be suspected where none existed. If it were only a coincidence, fears were childish. And the dog manifested no particular friendship for Tyck; he belonged to Lisa, and seemed to take no special notice of any one else.