I rolled up in an extra blanket that night and slept on the floor of the cabin, rather than disturb Jagg. We might have slept together without violating any of the precepts of _The Ladies’ Own_, for, even in high circles, people often sleep with Kids, but my natural instincts were against it and I let Jagg have the bed.
In the morning, I closely scrutinised the ground over which my butter-ball had come. At regular intervals were the deep, pointed excavations before referred to, and I surmised that they had been made by his horns. In them I appropriately planted goatsrue. My grandmother had left some seeds of this herb on the shelf in the cabin, and I had been intending to plant them for some time.
I followed the trail into the woods until I came to the thicket where I had felt myself observed. The empty flask lay on the ground and corroborated my suspicions. The branches were broken down all through the shrubbery, and the bare earth was thick with tiny hoof-marks in prints of two and three which were strangely suggestive of a waltz.
When I went back, Jagg came out of the cabin, very pale and repentant, blinking sleepily and wagging his insignificant tail. I spoke a few kind words to him and we breakfasted together.
In less than a week he had recovered his spirits, and his devotion to me was really extraordinary. He followed me like an unpaid bill and never took his eyes away from me except to sleep. At night he lay like a dog in my cabin door, whither he had dragged his bed, and usually waked me by prodding me playfully, in some sensitive spot, with the sharp tip of one of his horns.
“There was something very human in the grateful look he gave me just before closing his eyes.”]
There was something mysterious in his eyes. They were fairly human in their expressiveness, and his intelligence was also of that high order which Man proudly claims as his own. I discovered it accidentally.
Most hermits, I find, are wont to relieve their solitude by declaiming poetry, and I was no exception to the rule. I knew all of _Thanatopsis_ and most of _The Ancient Mariner_. When I recited these, Jagg always listened with an air of polite interest. One morning, however, as I built my fire, I chanced to repeat Cowper’s beautiful lines beginning: “O for a lodge in some vast wilderness!”