In a sense it is true. In another it
is not.
To teach the average elderly dog to sit up and beg, or to roll
over twice, or to do other of the asinine things with which
humans stultify the natural good sense of their canine chums, is
as hard as to teach a sixty-year-old grave-digger to become a
musical composer.
But no dog with a full set of brains is ever past learning new
things which are actually needful for him to learn. And, sad to
say, many an old dog, on his own account, picks up odd new
accomplishments--exploits which would never have occurred to him
in his early prime. Nobody knows why. But it has happened,
numberless times.
And so it was with Sunnybank Lad.
Laddie had passed his twelfth birthday; when, by some strange
freak, he brought home one day a lace parasol. He had found it in
the highroad, on his way back to the Place after a sedate ramble
in the forest. Now, it was nothing new for the great collie to
find missing articles belonging to the Mistress or to the Master.
Every now and then he would lay at their feet a tobacco pouch or
a handkerchief or a bunch of keys that had been dropped,
carelessly, somewhere on the grounds; and which Lad recognized,
by scent, as belonging to one of the two humans he loved.
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