[ Bates / Sigurd the Golden Collie ]
Sigurd the Golden Collie and Other Comrades of the Road was first published in book form in 1919 (E. P. Dutton, New York), though some sections had earlier appeared in various magazines. The book was reprinted in 1921.
Katharine Lee Bates (1859 – 1929) is best remembered today as the author of the lyrics to "America the Beautiful," inspired by her trip to the summit of Pike's Peak in Colorado, but she was a prolific author of children's books (both prose and poetry), travel narratives, scholarly works on English literature (she was an English professor at Wellesly College), and more. Bates was an avowed animal lover and had several collies, including the Sigurd who is the subject of this non-fiction book.
One review of this book remarked that "It cannot be classed simply as 'another dog-book,' for its appeal and sympathy extend further than this and make it a book of human personality." (Publisher's Weekly, vol 97 (January 3, 1920), p. 27).
The anecdotes about Sigurd the collie include several references to a Newfoundland dog who had belonged to a pair of sisters, living near Bates and her companion, who had founded a successful girls' school. The sisters acquire one of Sigurd's littermates, whom they name Laddie:
The checks of the school [founded by the two sisters] are still stamped with the head of Don, their black Newfoundland, who had a passion for attending the morning service in the school hall and nipping the heels of the kneeling girls. In the repeating of the Lord's Prayer he would join with a subdued rumble, doubtless acceptable to his Creator, but when shut out from the sacred exercises, he would howl under the windows an anthem of his own that offended both Heaven and earth.
In the inexorable process of the years, Don grew old, becoming a very Uncle Roly-Poly, but he was only loved the more. A cherished legend of the school relates how he was sleeping on his rug by the bed of one of his mistresses on a winter night, dreaming a saintly dream of chasing cats out of Paradise, when some real or fancied noise awoke him and, the faithful guardian of the school, he rushed through the low, open window and out upon the piazza roof, barking his thunderous warning to all trespassers. But he was still so bewildered with sleep that his legs ran faster than his mind and, before he knew it, he had pitched off the edge of that icy roof and was floundering in the snow beneath, the most astonished dog that ever bayed the moon. What happened to him then is supposed to have been related by Don himself:
"My howls dismayed the starry skies,
The Great and Little Dippers, O!
Till came an angel in disguise,
In dressing gown and slippers, O!
I staggered up the steepy stair;
She pushed me from behind, Bow wow!
She tended me with mickle care,
O winsome womankind! Bow wow!
She bathed my brow and bruisèd knee.
I only whined the louder, O!
She murmured: 'Homeopathy!
I'll give dear Don a powder,' O!
And may I be a pink-eyed rabbit
If she chose not from her stock, Bow wow!
FOR PERSONS OF A GOUTY HABIT
WHO'VE HAD A NERVOUS SHOCK. Bow wow!"
Other dogs had come after, notably Cardigan, a stately St. Bernard, who made the fatal mistake of biting a pacifist, but Laddie, the only real rival of Don in the Sisters' affections, was the crown of their delight in doghood. (63 - 64)
Two other incidental references to Newfoundlands occur in this novel:
Sigurd lived too early to take part in the Free Verse controversy, but he evinced an open mind on matters metrical in that he liked Lord Byron's inscription for his Newfoundland Boatswain no better than Lord Eldon's for his Newfoundland Cæsar. It was Sir William Watson's famous quatrain, An Epitaph, that affected him most keenly, because it invited emphasis on the one word that always brought him springing to his feet.
"His friends he loved. His fellest earthly foes
— Cats — I believe he did but feign to hate.
My hand will miss the insinuated nose,
Mine eyes the tail that wagged contempt at Fate." (127 - 128)
. . . .
If Sigurd seemed responsive, I might go on with accounts of Mrs. Browning's Flush; of Hogg's Hector, "auld, towzy, trusty friend"; of Arnold's dachshunds, Geist, Max and Kaiser; of Gilder's Leo,
"Leo the shaggy, the lustrous, the giant, the gentle Newfoundland,"
of Lehman's "flop-eared" Rufus, and of Miss Letts' terrier Tim in his "wheaten-colored coat." (130)
(The quotation regarding Leo is from an 1891 poem, "Leo," by the American poet and writer Richard Watson Gilder.)