The Little Lady of the Big House

From the first the voyage was going wrong. Routed out of my hotel on a bitter March morning I had crossed Baltimore and reached the pier-end precisely on time. At nine oclock the tug was to have taken me down the bay and put me on board the Elsinore and with growing irritation I sat frozen inside my taxicab and waited. On the seat outside the driver and Wada sat hunched in a temperature perhaps half a degree colder than mine. And there was no tug. Possum the fox-terrier puppy Galbraith had so inconsi-derately foisted upon me whimpered and shivered on my lap inside my greatcoat and under the fur robe. But he would not settle down. Continually he whimpered and clawed and struggled to get out. And once out and bitten by the cold with equal insistence he whimpered and clawed to get back. His unceasing plaint and movement was anything but sedative to my jangled nerves. In the first place I was uninterested in the brute. He meant nothing to me. I did not know him. Time and again as I drearily waited I was on the verge of giving him to the driver. Once when two little girls-evidently the wharfingers daughters-went by my hand reached out to the door to open it so that I might call to them and present them with the puling little wretch.