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 his little dog began to wear an anxious expression when the hour for it to be put into the shed in the back yard approached. (For his mother had ordained that it must not sleep in the house.) One evening, he said, when he was just going to pick it up and carry it out, it looked at him ‘like a Christian, and waved its ‘and, I was going to say—well, you know ‘ow they do carry on sometimes, and the end of it was I put it under my coat, and ‘uddled it upstairs—and I’m afraid I as good as deceived my poor mother on the subject. After that the dog acted very artful with ‘iding itself under the bed for half-an-hour or more before bed-time came, and we worked it so as my mother never found out what we’d done.’ Of course Worby was glad of its company anyhow, but more particularly when the nuisance that is still remembered in Southminster as ‘the crying’ set in.

‘Night after night,’ said Worby, ‘that dog seemed to know it was coming; he’d creep out, he would, and snuggle into the bed and cuddle right up to me shivering, and when the crying come he’d be like a wild thing, shoving his head under my arm, and I was fully near as bad. Six or seven times we’d hear it, not more, and