He thought a dog free and unshackled to go or come as the wind listeth.

Penrod forgot the life he led Duke.
There was a long soliloquy upon the fence, a plaintive monologue without words: the boy's thoughts were adjectives, but they were expressed by a running film of pictures in his mind's eye, morbidly prophetic of the hideosities before him.

Finally he spoke aloud, with such spleen that Duke rose from his haunches and lifted one ear in keen anxiety.
"'I hight Sir Lancelot du Lake, the Child, Gentul-hearted, meek, and mild.
What though I'm BUT a littul child, Gentul-hearted, meek, and----' OOF!" All of this except "oof" was a quotation from the Child Sir Lancelot, as conceived by Mrs.Lora Rewbush.

Choking upon it, Penrod slid down from the fence, and with slow and thoughtful steps entered a one-storied wing of the stable, consisting of a single apartment, floored with cement and used as a storeroom for broken bric-a-brac, old paint-buckets, decayed garden-hose, worn-out carpets, dead furniture, and other condemned odds and ends not yet considered hopeless enough to be given away.
In one corner stood a large box, a part of the building itself: it was eight feet high and open at the top, and it had been constructed as a sawdust magazine from which was drawn material for the horse's bed in a stall on the other side of the partition.

The big box, so high and towerlike, so commodious, so suggestive, had ceased to fulfil its legitimate function; though, providentially, it had been at least half full of sawdust when the horse died.