stood for some moments, lost in deep thought. Jagg snatched it out of my hand and ate it, but not before I had made myself master of its contents. Later on, I was thankful for the ponderous verbiage with which the idea was practically swamped, though, as it happened, the obscurity was useless, the legal description of the property being appended. Jagg ruminated for some time upon the letter, but experienced no personal discomfort. He was very intelligent and doubtless believed, with the great Macaulay, that “a page digested is better than a book hurriedly read.”

Still we lived together—that is, Jagg lived, and I existed. The sight of him, through constant attrition, became an annoyance, and finally an irritation. He ate my clothes, tore all the love scenes out of my small but choice library of fiction, and took my article on Natural History Shams to ornament the head of his bed.

Before long I discovered an infallible method of communicating with him. I would write my remarks on a small slip of paper, in my fine Italian hand, and feed the paper to Jagg. As soon as it was assimilated into his system, he understood, but his answers were limited. He could shake his head when he meant “no” and nod when he meant “yes.” A bleat, of indescribable tonality, meant that he was unfamiliar with the topic, or else prevented by his personal handicap from making any sort of an explanation.

For instance, one fine morning, just at sunrise, I wrote: “Jagg, I am going to the village this afternoon. Will you be a nice Goatie and stay at home?” At nine o’clock, he grasped my meaning. Coming close to my knee he looked up into my face with an expression of adoring love, and sadly but firmly shook his head. I never knew him to lie, and at noon, when I started, Jagg rioted along beside me.

In town, by this time, they had decided that I was a editor on my Summer vacation, and they used to call us “The Two Bocks.” For some reason, this irritated me to such an extent that I was ready to lay out Jagg on his last bier, but I forebore to pull the trigger through a lingering belief in re-incarnation. Suppose Jagg were my grandmother, or some other distinguished ancestor? Moreover, I knew, through the subtle workings of some sixth sense, that I could not lose him before his time.

It happened that the county authorities stopped the Porcupine races by building barriers of chicken-coop netting here and there across the hill, and the inhabitants of the village, to a man, blamed me for it. I protested my innocence, but I was an outsider and my 

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