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The dog was put ashore under our very-noses, by the crew of a passing launch. :We were knitting on our veranda that afternoon, looking across at Sunset Island, which is four miles away. Carpenter was not in sight, and from down the beach came the yells and splashes that told that the college boys at the Watermelon Camp were bathing. We were sitting with our backs to them, when Tish said suddenly :

"There is a launch coming in."

There was, a very fine one, although handsome is as handsome does, as the colored man said about the hippopotamus. For as the launch steamed past, a man in a white uniform threw something with a thud on to the dock. It was a dog. The next moment they headed out into the lake again, paying no attention to Tish, who ran down the path and tried to signal them with the raffia basket she was making.

The dog came up and sniffed at her.

Now we never had any dogs on the island, even in the season. Tish's uncle had been bitten by a dog once, and although he never had hydrophobia, he was always strange afterward. They say that when he coughed it was exactly like a bark, and the very sight of a cat upset him terribly. Also, although the family never said much about this, I have heard that after he died they found quite a collection of bones in his upper washstand drawer. And my grandmother saw him once eating raw meat mixed with onion, between slices of bread! So when we bought the island, and sold parts of it for cottages, we always put in the agreement of sale: "No intoxicants, no phonographs and no dogs."

You may imagine how we felt, therefore, when we saw the dog following Tish up the path, and biting at her heels. (When a dog bites at your heels, and isn't wagging his tail, he is not playing; he is in earnest. It is much like that line in The Virginian —"When you say that, smile!". But this dog did not smile.)

Tish shouted to us, as she came, to run and shut Paulina, her cat, in the spare room, and to give her her catnip ball (the cat, not Tish). And then she came up and dropped on the porch step and covered up her feet, and the creature sat down before her and dared her to move.

That was the most terrible afternoon of my life. He sat there and drooled over the step, and growled now and then, and Tish told about her uncle, and Aggie said she knew a man who had been attacked by a bulldog, and the only way they got him loose was to give him—the dog—a hypodermic of poison and pry him off after he died.

To make matters worse, there did not seem to be a soul on the island. The boys from the camp had disappeared; Carpenter's cabin was closed and locked- At tea time the dog heard Paulina wailing up-stairs and he made a hole in the screen door and went after her. He had chewed almost through the guest room door before Aggie called him off with the chops for supper.

That decided us.

About eight o'clock that evening, while the creature was gnawing at a leg of the dining-room table, we held a whispered conference, and Tish came forward with a plan. It was very daring, and Aggie immediately objected. "It's all very well," she said, "to sit here in a rocking-chair and talk about rowing four miles to Sunset Island, with not one of us knowing anything about a boat, and Lizzie told by that fortune teller last spring that she would die by drowning. Not only that. How are you going to get the dog into the boat?"

Tish leaned forward cautiously. The Dog was still gnawing in the next room.

"Chloroform him!" she whispered. "Wait until he gets sleepy. Then take Lizzie's bath sponge, soak it with your chloroform liniment, Aggie, and when he's stupefied, carry him down and dump him in the boat."

"Why not let Carpenter do it, in the morning?" Aggie objected. She was green with nervousness.

"Carpenter!" Tish snorted. "If he ever sees that flea-bitten creature he will keep him."

(Carpenter, being an original settler, had never subscribed to the liquor, phonograph and dog clause.)

At eleven o'clock the Dog turned over on his side and went to sleep. We were ready. My sponge, saturated with Aggie's liniment and impaled on the end of Tish's umbrella, was held to his nostrils, and we each drew a long breath. But we had counted without Aggie's hay fever. Just as the creature seemed about settled and was growing limp, Aggie began to sneeze, and by the time the paroxysm was over the dog was awake and had eaten part of the sponge. It was a terrible disappointment. As Tish said afterward, we should have anaesthetized Aggie first

However, perhaps it was for the best, after all, for it made him very ill, and when, after Tish had washed the floor, she prodded him with the wooden handle of the mop and he only groaned, he had ceased to be formidable.

"It's now or never," Tish said, with determination, and put on her overshoes. It had been raining, and luckily Aggie put her plaid shawl around her shoulders. What we should have done later without that shawl I shudder to think. Tish put on a knitted cape and I tied a scarf over my head. Then, with the dog—no longer a capital D—wobbling at the end of a clothes-line, we started.

At the last minute Tish had a spell of conscience and hunted up a bottle of cleaning fluid to put in the boat.

"It's mostly gasoline," she said. "If it's mange it won't do any harm, and if it's fleas it will kill them- We can put it on just before we leave him on Sunset Island. You start pouring it at his nose and work along his back. The fleas will drop off his tail. Every creature deserves a chance."

None of us thought of the ether in the stuffy although, as it turned out, it did not hurt the dog. It was never used on the dog.

We got to the dock without incident, Aggie ahead with the dog, and Tish and I feeling for the rope of Carpenter's skiff. Tish had the scissors, in case we couldn't untie it. Just as we found it and stooped, something splashed. Tish straightened and gripped me by the arm.

"Did you throw anything in?" she demanded in an awful tone.

"Stop pinching me, Tish Carberry!" I snapped, "or I will."

There was silence for a minute; then there was a swirling whitish appearance at our very feet, and something dark raised itself up in the water and stood waving its arms. Then it gave a gurgle or two, choked, coughed and finally sneezed. We knew the sneeze; it was Aggie!

It was when she got her breath that she said the incredible thing, the thing she flatly denied afterward, but for which she was obliged to pay five dollars into the fine box.

"That damned dog pulled me in!" she gurgled. "I've thwallowed—" She clapped her hands to her mouth, and we knew at once. Her teeth!

We pulled them both out grimly—Aggie and the dog, and Tish ordered Aggie to the house for dry clothes at once. "And it might be as well, Agatha," she added coldly, "if you would wash your mouth out with soap. You can buy new teeth, but you can not buy another immortal soul."

Agatha sloshed a half-dozen steps up the dock. Then she turned on us both in the darkness.

"If you had thwallowed two gallonth of dirty water, tho that you can feel it thaking in you when you walk, and had lotht your thell back comb and your betht upper teeth, you wouldn't care, Tith Carberry, whether you had an immortal thoul or not."

Then she thtalked—stalked, I mean, up to the house. Tish was furious, but luckily, I have a sense of humor. With Aggie's soul hanging fire, so to speak, I sat down on the dock in the rain and laughed. That was the beginning of my deterioration; from that instant, when I braved rheumatism and Tish's displeasure, to that later moment just at dawn, when we came back to the dock again, draggled, dirty and guilty, I was forty-nine years young, reckless, disdainful of consequences, unmindful of wet feet and the proprieties, forgetful even of law and order. That awful, glorious night, when young Love—but that's the story.