A Dogs Tale | Page 8

wanted to know what
made me limp, they looked ashamed and changed the subject, and
sometimes when people hunted them this way and that way with
questions about it, it looked to me as if they were going to cry.
And this was not all the glory; no, the master's friends came, a whole
twenty of the most distinguished people, and had me in the laboratory,
and discussed me as if I was a kind of discovery; and some of them
said it was wonderful in a dumb beast, the finest exhibition of instinct
they could call to mind; but the master said, with vehemence, "It's far
above instinct; it's REASON, and many a man, privileged to be saved
and go with you and me to a better world by right of its possession, has
less of it that this poor silly quadruped that's foreordained to perish";
and then he laughed, and said: "Why, look at me--I'm a sarcasm! bless
you, with all my grand intelligence, the only thing I inferred was that
the dog had gone mad and was destroying the child, whereas but for the

beast's intelligence--it's REASON, I tell you!--the child would have
perished!"
They disputed and disputed, and I was the very center of subject of it
all, and I wished my mother could know that this grand honor had
come to me; it would have made her proud.
Then they discussed optics, as they called it, and whether a certain
injury to the brain would produce blindness or not, but they could not
agree about it, and said they must test it by experiment by and by; and
next they discussed plants, and that interested me, because in the
summer Sadie and I had planted seeds--I helped her dig the holes, you
know--and after days and days a little shrub or a flower came up there,
and it was a wonder how that could happen; but it did, and I wished I
could talk--I would have told those people about it and shown then how
much I knew, and been all alive with the subject; but I didn't care for
the optics; it was dull, and when the came back to it again it bored me,
and I went to sleep.
Pretty soon it was spring, and sunny and pleasant and lovely, and the
sweet mother and the children patted me and the puppy good-by, and
went away on a journey and a visit to their kin, and the master wasn't
any company for us, but we played together and had good times, and
the servants were kind and friendly, so we got along quite happily and
counted the days and waited for the family.
And one day those men came again, and said, now for the test, and they
took the puppy to the laboratory, and I limped three-leggedly along, too,
feeling proud, for any attention shown to the puppy was a pleasure to
me, of course. They discussed and experimented, and then suddenly the
puppy shrieked, and they set him on the floor, and he went staggering
around, with his head all bloody, and the master clapped his hands and
shouted:
"There, I've won--confess it! He's a blind as a bat!"
And they all said:

"It's so--you've proved your theory, and suffering humanity owes you a
great debt from henceforth," and they crowded around him, and wrung
his hand cordially and thankfully, and praised him.
But I hardly saw or heard these things, for I ran at once to my little
darling, and snuggled close to it where it lay, and licked the blood, and
it put its head against mine, whimpering softly, and I knew in my heart
it was a comfort to it in its pain and trouble to feel its mother's touch,
though it could not see me. Then it dropped down, presently, and its
little velvet nose rested upon the floor, and it was still, and did not
move any more.
Soon the master stopped discussing a moment, and rang in the footman,
and said, "Bury it in the far corner of the garden," and then went on
with the discussion, and I trotted after the footman, very happy and
grateful, for I knew the puppy was out of its pain now, because it was
asleep. We went far down the garden to the farthest end, where the
children and the nurse and the puppy and I used to play in the summer
in the shade of a great elm, and there the footman dug a hole, and I saw
he was going to plant the puppy, and I was glad, because it would grow
and come up a fine handsome dog, like Robin Adair, and be a beautiful
surprise for the family when they came home; so I tried to