This is a chronicle of the doings of Jack and Jill the twins, pups of Waddles and Happy of Happy Hall, who, from the age of twelve days when they completely opened their eyes on the world, thought for a time, until they met experience, that it was made exclusively for themselves, according to the thinking of many two-footed children.

After the going away of Lumberlegs, Waddles’s youth came back to him. He went off on long excursions with his neighbours, bayed a juicy tenor in the quartet that led the Dogtown chorus in its practise on moonlight nights, and actually threw bones into the air and played with them as of old.Not that he could turn as quickly, and his portliness got rather in the way as he tried to double on himself; but the spirit was there, which is the thing that counts.

Waddles, Mayor of Dogtown, had always been an important person, but Waddles, the married man, father of a family and master of a home consisting of three houses surrounded by a fine yard and equipped with porcelain-lined food dishes, hay pillows, and other luxuries, was of double dignity.

With the extra food supply necessary for more dogs, he was able to be a greater patron of the poor in the line of bones and left-over dog biscuit. Also it was not an unusual thing to see him piloting a tired and thirsty dog, who had been following a team bound for the market town, to the trough that caught the well drippings, and then to a particularly cool resting spot under the quince bushes; for this particular highway was a trying place for thirsty animals, as there was not a single spring or drinking-trough between the Hilltop Kennels and Happy Hall. Yet, in spite of all this outside notoriety, as far as his own particular family was concerned, he was tolerated, but that was about all.

Anne expected that he would be sad or resentful, as when Lumberlegs claimed affection that Waddles considered his own exclusive property. He was neither the one nor the other. The proverb, “Every dog has its day,” is evidently one of the recognized family dog laws. It was Mrs. Happy Waddles’s day just then, for was she not the mother of the twins?

It was to her apartments in the big kennel once owned by Lumberlegs that visitors went and gave ohs and ahs of admiration. Her ladyship had new milk and all the tidbits, and did not have to submit to a bath for several weeks lest she should be chilled.

Waddles was polite but bored; he spent a great deal of time under the flap of the cellar door where he could keep an eye on his home from a distance. He also did a great deal of thinking in these days.

There are people who say that dogs have no family life, but that is either because these people do not really know dogs or have only seen them reared in great kennels, for kennel dogs are as different in their instincts and feelings from home dogs as orphan-asylum children are from home-cuddled babies.

Though Waddles kept rather aloof from his family, what else could he do? As they were not living in a state of wild nature it was not necessary for him to hunt food for them.

If he asked Happy to take a walk, she would give him her usual little caress on the nose and trot beside him as far as the gate perhaps, then suddenly turn as if she had forgotten something, drop her body after a way she had when she put on speed, and dash back to her house as if it was the burrow of a rabbit whose fresh trail she had crossed.

Once or twice Waddles had gone into the nursery kennel and sniffed at the pups in an inquisitive sort of way, but Happy immediately nosed herself between them and their father, as much as to say, “Please be careful, men are so awkward,” when he quickly retired under the cellar door, to his watch tower on the porch corner, or to his bachelor kennel, the third and smallest house of the group. This he had always used as a retreat from sun and rain, or when he was too muddy from hunting to make him welcome in the house, only being chained there as a punishment or in emergencies.

When Jack and Jill were three weeks old, and might fairly be said to be on their legs, they were as pretty a pair of beagles as one could wish to see. Equally mated in size, build, and general colouring, Jack, however, having the longer ears and rich brown head markings; yet in temper and general behaviour they were as different from one another as any two dogs could be.

Jack was affectionate and sedate, with a patient expression in his steel-blue eyes that one day would, doubtless, be deep brown like his father’s. Jill was impetuous, which often passes for affection, capricious as April sunshine, with an expression of pretty impertinence upon her face. She had dark lashes and a rim of dark brown around the edges of her eyelids which gave her a look of mingled wisdom, slyness, and determination to have her own way, that was at first captivating.

Happy was a model mother, and as soon as the pups had their breakfast she gave each a bath from head to foot, or rather tail tip, with much effort and many grunts.

These were the first puppies that Anne had ever been with so intimately that she could watch their growth from day to day, and it seemed as if she did little else but watch them when she was out of school; in addition she had all that she could manage in keeping Tommy from carrying them about, to the destruction of their digestions and the straining of their backs.

All Anne’s persuasion, however, did not have as much effect as the peremptory bark and nip in the ankle that Happy administered one morning, when she surprised Tommy in waking the twins from their nap that he might take them to ride in his wheelbarrow, for Happy, usually so meek, was at that time a despot whom no one on the premises thought of disobeying, with the exception of her daughter.

It was very easy for Happy to give Jack his bath, but with Jill her patience was sorely tried. When it was time to do her back she would roll over and kick her legs in the air, chew her mother’s ear, or make a tug-of-war rope of her tail. Then, when the bath was completed all but her fat little stomach, she would grind it into the dirt and brace her paws, until her mother, quite out of patience, with a twist of one paw would lay Jill on her back with a growled rebuke and a curious threatening expression of face which she made by turning back her upper lip from her teeth, as both fighting dogs and wolves do when freeing their jaws to bite.

At three weeks old Jill had developed a shrill bark full ten days in advance of her brother. At four weeks she succeeded both in catching her own tail and in washing some mud from her hind paw very neatly.When Jack attempted to do the same he only tumbled backward out of the nursery door into the water dish, aided by a push from his sister, who then rolled frantically about the floor in glee, while his mother roused from her one-eye-open doze and seized the opportunity to give him an extra bath.

When the twins were six weeks old Happy began their education in earnest. Kennel puppies are usually weaned about this time and are separated from their mother, so that instead of being trained by her to act and think for themselves, they only learn, often through punishment, blind obedience to rules they do not understand. Of course this sort of puppyhood does not make as clever a dog as the other.

Waddles himself was an example of early training by his mother, who, being a poor widow with a large family and owned by a very unsuccessful truck farmer, had great difficulty in making both ends meet; consequently Waddles and his brothers and sisters were taught very early to shift for themselves.

It was owing to his patient cleverness in catching a small squirrel by the roadside that Waddles, when only four months old, had attracted the attention of Anne’s father, who bought him from his owner for five dollars. As Anne once said, it seemed strange that five dollars could buy so much when often one got so little for it; and then as she grew to love him as a friend she did not like to think that he was bought at all, for it did not seem right to sell such as he without his own consent.

After learning to be clean, the second lesson that Happy taught the twins was how to keep cool. Anne knew very well that dogs do not perspire like people, but only by the moisture that drips from their mouths, so that they need plenty of cool water to drink and shady places to lie in if they are to be comfortable in hot weather. She also knew that Waddles and Lumberlegs dug themselves holes in the dirt, as she thought to keep off the flies; but why Happy should try to burrow under the foundation of the nursery puzzled her. It was not to bury bones, for the chosen spot for that was far away from home.

To help her, as well as to see what she would do, Anne loosened two or three stones from the foundation of the tool house that stood next to the kennel, much to Happy’s delight, who then began to burrow furiously, throwing the dirt behind her with her strong front paws.All day long she worked, while as soon as the dirt ceased coming out at the mouth of the burrow Anne could hear it flying up against the floor of the tool house, which, by the way, her father also used as a dark room for developing photographs. Late in the afternoon Anne heard Happy whining by the outside wall. She had kept at work all day, only leaving to feed the pups who at this time varied their milk diet with a dinner of puppy biscuit soaked in weak soup. Anne loosened a couple of stones at this side as well, and in a very few minutes Happy dug herself out and circled about, barking with every symptom of joy. But when Anne was about to replace the stones, the little beagle thrust herself between her mistress and the burrow in the same way as she had come between Waddles and the pups, when he came to look at them.

Anne saw that Happy was working out some plan of her own, so she waited and the next day discovered it.

In the morning when she went to look at the pups they were nowhere to be seen, the gate of the yard was closed, and for a moment Anne feared they might have been stolen, but baby barks from under the tool house reassured her. Going to the outside opening of the burrow and lying flat in the grass she peered in. At first she could see nothing, but in a minute the light from between the stone chinks revealed Happy and the twins stretched flat on their stomachs in the fresh earth, Mamma dozing comfortably, the youngsters yap-yapping to themselves; for having a deaf parent they were quite safe in saying anything that they chose.

“It’s a cool house, a regular summer day-nursery, the dear clever mother to think of it!” exclaimed Anne in delight, quite forgetful of the fact that her own chin was resting in the dirt.

“Of course if it’s the earth cooling down at night that makes the dew collect, it must cool their fat little stomachs somehow the same way, and puppy stomachs always seem to be boiling warm. Here we’ve been and pounded the dirt in the kennel yard as hard as rock to keep it from being dug up, just as if digging was only mischief instead of a ‘must be.’ Of course all dogs aren’t as wise about it as Happy and it was rather mean of Lumberlegs last summer to make a cooler out of mother’s mignonette bed when it was in full bloom.”

It would never do for puppies to stay still all day even in so delightful a place as their mother had made. Its best use was as a retreat after exercising, of which they had plenty.

If their food supply had been uncertain, “food burying” would have undoubtedly been their next lesson, and as it was, instinct whispered in Jill’s beautiful brown ears one day when she was eight weeks old, and when Jack was being vigorously flead by his mother she took his portion of puppy biscuit and laid it, piece by piece, in the deep hoof tracks of the barn road, where a few shoves from her nose quickly covered it.

Jack, on the other hand, did not begin to bury food until he was fully ten weeks old and had become quite accustomed to seeing his mother, father, and sister perform the task. Even then he did not use any judgment in the selection of a place or dig proper holes, but made very conspicuous mounds in the middle of the walks where the cache could be seen by the first passer-by.

It was at this time that Anne discovered that Happy had two different ways of burying extra food. Meat or bones she invariably put in the earth, digging deep and covering carefully that the morsel might keep cool and not ripen too fast. She usually chose soft spots in the vegetable garden for this. Often having more food in storage than she needed, it stayed so long that the Sexton Beetles gut away with a good deal of it, much to Happy’s surprise; for as they bore it to their lairs underground, there was no surface trail to tell her keen nose whence it had been carried or by whom.

If the morsel she wished to hide was dog biscuit, oatmeal cake, or corn-bread, Happy worked quite differently. After finding a thick tuft of grass, she pushed the scrap well into the centre of it and then pulled the grass blades together over the top, weaving them loosely as if her nose and upper front teeth had been a crochet needle.