Page:The Country Boy.djvu/83

Rh all the glass and breaking it and brought us the knife.

An actor finally offered me $100 for Duff. My father came to Portland to see me about accepting the offer. We talked it over one day on the Stark street ferry. Duff was with us and we thought he knew what we were talking about. He looked as sad as father, and I felt I couldn’t bear to sell him, though I couldn’t imagine anything that one hundred dollars wouldn’t buy.

Father said life was made up of such sorrows and disappointments; that while nothing could be finer than to spend a lifetime with a dog of such wonderful intelligence and sympathy, still a hundred dollars at compound interest at 10 per cent. for twenty years would buy so-and-so and so-and-so, and that in the professional life Duff was leading he might be stolen.

I was about to agree. All this time Duff had stood between us, his eyes on the floor. I spoke to him and he raised his head slowly and looked at father full in the eye.

In that look he saved us. Father turned to me and said: