Lad of Sunnybank Quotes

“If you had let him alone, he’d have let you alone,” retorted Friend. “When you laid hands on him he got back at you. I don’t blame him. Any human would have done the same if he’d been mauled by a stranger he didn’t like. You can’t expect a dog to act more civilized than a human, can you? (Not so very much more civilized, anyhow.) And while we’re talking about it, I’ll ask you not to call the Big Dog a ‘cur’ any more. He’s a thoroughbred. And he’s more of a gentleman than ever you’ll be in a hundred years. Now get back to your work.”
― Albert Payson Terhune, Lad of Sunnybank

“You can have a thousand dollars of mine,” laughed the Master, “for every bite Lad gives Bobby—or any other child. Let them alone. Neither of them could have a better pal than the other. With Lad to tag around with him, Bobby is safer than if you hired three private detectives to guard him.”
― Albert Payson Terhune, Lad of Sunnybank

“But he was beginning to grow old. He slept more than had been his wont, and bit by bit his long daily runs were shortening. As with some fastidious elderly bachelor or spinster, the approach of age made Lad fussily averse to any disturbing change in the routine of his placid daily life. Strangers and guests were increasingly unwelcome to him.”
― Albert Payson Terhune, Lad of Sunnybank

“(Sunnybank Gray Dawn outlived all the Little People I have spoken of—except Tippy—in this book. Dawn was the last of the great Sunnybank collies. He died on May 30, 1929, leaving bitter heartaches behind him. Peace to his white soul!)”
― Albert Payson Terhune, Lad of Sunnybank

“Being only a dog, Lad had no way of knowing his vanished deities ever would come back to him. Pitifully he followed the Mistress upstairs and down and everywhere she moved, as she prepared for the departure. He refused to be consoled when she patted him and when she said she and the Master would be back in a few days. His classic head drooped. His plumed tail hung disconsolate. He was the picture of utter misery.”
― Albert Payson Terhune, Lad of Sunnybank

“With grim care the Master and the superintendent watched them. It is at such times of climatic stress that dogs occasionally become sick or half crazed with the heat, unless they are kept quiet and as cool as may be. Hence the superstition that rabies walks rampant during the so-called dog days. Almost never is it true rabies. Nearly always it is some malady or other due to exposure or over-exertion or wrong feeding, on the part of the humans in charge.”
― Albert Payson Terhune, Lad of Sunnybank

“Such a collie was Lad. At a time when Bruce and Wolf and Bobby and Lady and young Gray Dawn were half naked, Lad was still carrying the enormous outer and under coat which by rights should have been his in January. Not for another month or more would he begin to shed in real earnest—and to strew the floors and rugs and furniture, and the trousers legs and skirts of the household, with tufts and strands of dead hair.”
― Albert Payson Terhune, Lad of Sunnybank

“All our lives here,” grumbled the Master, as they set off for home, “we’ve been on mighty pleasant terms with our neighbors. They are as white and fine a lot of people as ever were born—or they were till they got this scare about every animal that moves on four legs. But in the past five minutes I suppose I’ve made enemies of half of them. That’s the rotten part of it: One can spend thirty years in building up friendships that can be wrecked forever in thirty seconds.”
― Albert Payson Terhune, Lad of Sunnybank

“Ordinarily it would have been great fun for her to run up to this huge and gentle-looking collie and pat him. But the terrors of her parents’ lecture were still fresh in her baby mind.”
― Albert Payson Terhune, Lad of Sunnybank

“The only place that’s better than Sunnybank,” he mused, his hand on Lad’s silken head, his eyes ceasing to rove over his moonlit acres and resting happily on his wife—“the only place that’s better than Sunnybank is heaven. And that’s only because in heaven, according to the Bible, ‘there is no marrying or giving in marriage.”
― Albert Payson Terhune, Lad of Sunnybank

“The clergyman had held field services in France when the shells were dropping all about his khaki congregation. Thus, the advent of a huge and muddily shaggy dog did not throw him off his mental balance in the mere reading of a marriage service.”
― Albert Payson Terhune, Lad of Sunnybank

“His nostrils were aquiver, isolating and tabulating the assailant’s scent, for future use. For a dog does his recognizing by scent, rather than by sight. The smell of the man’s perspiring hand was still rank on Lad’s neck fur. The dog would not forget. If ever the occasion should arise, he would not fail to pay the rest of the account. A collie has a queer power of remembering both good and evil—save only toward those he loves. With those he shows a divine forgetfulness of past bad treatment.”
― Albert Payson Terhune, Lad of Sunnybank

“He was hailed with much cordiality by the group. The maid of honor, who was an old friend of Laddie’s, unlimbered a candy box from under her arm and offered the collie a large and mushy and delectable bonbon. With outward gravity, but inward bliss, he accepted the gift daintily, and fell to munching it with infinite epicurean relish. Sweets were taboo for dogs, at The Place, as a rule. Lad loved them the more for their rarity.”
― Albert Payson Terhune, Lad of Sunnybank

“That’s the difference between us,” grumbled the Master, unheeding. “Every normal woman adores big weddings. Every normal man loathes them. A good lively ten-round prize-fight is better worth watching than all the weddings since the one at Cana. I’ve a good mind to quit, cold, and go fishing off our point that afternoon in a scow, and sit there with a pipe and a torn flannel suit and a straw hat with a hole in it, and watch the sweating guests up here on the lawn and——What’s the joke?” he broke off. “The joke,” she explained, swallowing her laughter with difficulty—“the joke is that you said exactly the same thing before our own wedding, nearly twenty-five years ago.”
― Albert Payson Terhune, Lad of Sunnybank

“Again and again the tobacco smell on the Master’s breath and clothes had sickened the collie; so had the supposedly delicate perfumes used by the Mistress. Yet blithely had Lad endured these affronts to his tortured nostrils, in order to remain close beside these two humans who were his gods.”
― Albert Payson Terhune, Lad of Sunnybank

“Nor did he smell any worse, even now, to these humans, than many humans had smelled to Lad’s tormented senses, again and again, with their sickening perfumes and tobacco and booze! Lad had borne all that—though he loathed it—for the sake of being near those he loved. Yet when, through no desire of his own, he chanced to be malodorous, they ordered him from them in disgust!”
― Albert Payson Terhune, Lad of Sunnybank

“In those days, Lad was the only Sunnybank collie permitted in the dining-room. Whether the family was eating alone or with a roomful of guests, the great collie’s place was always on the floor, close to the left of the Master’s chair, during meals. This to the stumbling discomfort of the servants, in passing things; but as the servants idolized the dog, there was no complaint.”
― Albert Payson Terhune, Lad of Sunnybank

“Mrs. Lejeune wrote that beautiful essay in verse, on dogs, for one of the English magazines,” the Mistress was saying. “So she must like them. I wouldn’t have brought Lad over to meet her unless her essay had shown such a splendid understanding of—” “Mrs. Lejeune didn’t write it,” was the Master’s morbid contradiction. “Maeterlinck wrote it. She took most of the best things in his ‘My Friend The Dog,’ and rhymed them and put them into her own words.”
― Albert Payson Terhune, Lad of Sunnybank

“Strong as was the temptation, Lad drew back from the luscious morsel, after the first instinctive advance. Had the meat been found lying there, he might or might not have eaten it. But he had heard the man throw it to him and it bore the scent of Dilver’s hand. Always Lad had been taught, as had others of the Sunnybank collies, to accept no food from an outsider. This is a needful precaution for dogs that go to shows—at which more than one fine animal has been poisoned—or for dogs that have a home to guard and must be prevented from accepting drugged or poisoned meat. Lad had learned the rule, from his earliest days.”
― Albert Payson Terhune, Lad of Sunnybank

“Again and again he used to do this. Lad seemed to enjoy it, for he would stand at grave attention, as though listening to something the coon was confiding to him. “I’m sure he’s telling Laddie a secret when he does that,” said the Mistress. “Nonsense!” scoffed the Master. “We’re not living in fable-land. More likely the pesky coon is hunting Lad’s ear for fleas. Likelier still, it’s just a senseless game they’ve invented.”
― Albert Payson Terhune, Lad of Sunnybank

“Here comes Laddie,” she said. “Robert was looking all over for him when he dipped the other dogs. He came and asked me if——” “Trust Lad to know when dipping-day comes around!” laughed the Master. “Unless you or I happen to be on hand, he always gives the men the slip. He—”
― Albert Payson Terhune, Lad of Sunnybank

“I think Ramses is a wonderful name for a pet raccoon. Don't you?"
"Why Ramses?" argued the Master, glumly.
"Why not Ramses?" demanded the Mistress in polite surprise.
"I don't know the answer," grouchily admitted the defeated Master, "Ramses it is. Or rather he is. I think it's a hideous name, especially for a coon. Let's hope he'll die. Lad, next time you go into the woods, I'll muzzle you. You've just let us in for a mort of bother."
Lad wiggled self-consciously, and stooped again to lick smooth the ruffled fur of Ramses.”
― Albert Payson Terhune, Lad of Sunnybank