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The next moment the dog was crouching abjectly at the squire’s feet.

"Well, he’s a rum ‘un!. " said old Cooper, looking hard at him.

"I like him," said the squire.

"I don’t," said Cooper.

"But he shan’t come in here again," said the squire.

"I shouldn’t wonder if he was a witch," said old Cooper, who remembered more tales of witchcraft than are now current in that part of the world.

"He’s a good dog," said the squire, dreamily. "I remember the time I’d a given a handful for him  but I’ll never be good for nothing again. Come along. "

And he stooped down and patted him. So up jumped the dog and looked up in his face, as if watching for some sign, ever so slight, which he might obey.

Cooper did not like a bone in that dog’s skin. He could not imagine what his master saw to admire in him. He kept him all night in the gun room, and the dog accompanied him in his halting rambles about the place. The fonder his master grew of him, the less did Cooper and the other servants like him.

"He hasn’t a point of a good dog about him," Cooper would growl. "I think Master Charlie be blind. And old Captain (an old red parrot, who sat chained to a perch in the oak parlor, and conversed with himself, and nibbled at his claws and bit his perch all day)  old Captain, the only living thing, except one or two of us, and the squire himself, that remembers the old master, the minute he saw the dog, screeched as if he was struck, shakin’ his feathers out quite wild, and drops down, poor old soul, a-hanging’ by his foot, in a fit. "

But there is no accounting for fancies, and the squire ives one of those dogged persons who persist more obstinately in their whims the more they are opposed, But Charles Marston’s health suffered by his lameness. The transition frown habitual and violent exercise to such a life as his privation now consigned him to, was never made without a risk to health; and a host of dyspeptic annoyances, the existence of which he had never dreamed of before, now beset him in sad earnest Among these was the now not unfrequent troubling of his sleep with dreams and nightmares. In these his canine favorite invariably had a part and was generally a central, and sometimes a solitary, figure. In these visions the dog seemed to stretch himself up the side of the squire’s bed, and in dilated proportions to sit at his feet, with a horrible likeness t
o the pug features of old Squire Toby, with his tricks of wagging his head and throwing up his chin; and then he would talk to him about Scroope, and tell him "all wasn’t straight," and that he "must make it up wi’ Scroope," that he, the old squire, had "served him an ill turn," that "time was nigh up," and that "fair was fair," and he was "troubled where he was, about Scroope. "

Then in his dream this semi-human brute would approach his face to his, crawling and crouching up his body, heavy as lead, till the face of the beast was laid on his, with the same odious caresses and stretchings and writhings which he had seen over the old squire’s grave. Then Charlie would wake up with a gasp and a howl, and start upright in the bed, bathed in a cold moisture, and fancy he saw something white sliding off the foot of the bed. Sometimes he thought it might be the curtain with white lining that slipped down, or the coverlet disturbed by his uneasy turnings; but he always fancied, at such moments, that he saw something white sliding hastily off the bed; and always when he had been visited by such dreams the dog next morning was more than usually caressing and servile, as if to obliterate, by a more than ordinary welcome, the sentiment of disgust which the horror of the night had left behind it.