He sat down beside him, and put a kindly arm about him.
"Why, why, Nappy! Yes, 'sall right, yes, he _was_--most beautiful doggie
in the whole world; yes, he _was_."
He hardly dared look toward the scene of the outrage. The calamity was
overwhelming, but how could dogs know any better? Timidly, at length, he
raised his eyes, first to where the fragmentary head lay, then to the
torn body.
Something about the latter electrified him. He leaped from the couch and
seized an end of the linen that bound the mummy. He pulled, and the
linen unwound. He curiously surveyed something at his feet. It was a
tightly rolled wad of excelsior. The swathing of linen--he had unwound
it to where the hands should have been folded on the breast--had
enclosed excelsior.
Dazedly he looked into the empty case. Upon one of the new boards he saw
marked with the careless brush of some shipping-clerk, "Watkins & Co.,
Hartford, Conn."
Again, as with the unstable lilac-bushes, his world spun about him; it
drew in and darkened. He had the sensation of a grain of dust sucked
down a vast black funnel.
Outside the quiet room, the city went on its ruthless, noisy way. In
there where dynasties had fallen and a monarch lay prone, a spotted dog
sporting with a _papier-mache_ something, came suddenly on a cold hand
flung out on the rug. Nap instantly forsook the sham for the real,
deserted the head of Ram-tah, and laved Bean's closed eyes with a
lolloping pink tongue.
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