eant bawled, "have you got a good grip of that man?"

"I have so," said Shawn.

"If he gets away I'll kick the belly out of you; mind that now! Come
along with you and no more of your slouching."

They marched down the road in a tingling silence.

"Dogs," said the Philosopher, "are a most intelligent race of people--"

"People, my granny!" said the sergeant.

"From the earliest ages their intelligence has been observed and
recorded, so that ancient literatures are bulky with references to their
sagacity and fidelity--"

"Will you shut your old jaw?" said the sergeant.

"I will not," said the Philosopher. "Elephants also are credited with an
extreme intelligence and devotion to their masters, and they will build
a wall or nurse a baby with equal skill and happiness. Horses have
received high recommendations in this respect, but crocodiles, hens,
beetles, armadillos, and fish do not evince any remarkable partiality
for man--"

"I wish," said the sergeant bitterly, "that all them beasts were stuffed
down your throttle the way you'd have to hold your prate."

"It doesn't matter," said the Philosopher. "I do not know why these
animals should attach themselves to men with gentleness and love and yet
be able to preserve intact their initial bloodthirstiness, so that while
they will allow their masters to misuse them in any way they will yet
fight most willingly with each other, and are never really happy saving
in the conduct of some private and nonsensical battle of their own. I do
not believe that it is fear which tames these creatures into mildness,
but that the most savage animal has a capacity for love which has not
been sufficiently noted, and which, if more intelligent attention
had been directed upon it, would have raised them to the status of
intellectual animals as against intelligent ones, and, perhaps, have
opened to us a correspondence which could not have been other than
beneficial."

"Keep your eyes out for that gap in the trees, Shawn," said the
sergeant.

"I'm doing that," said Shawn.

The Philosopher continued:

"Why can I not exchange ideas with a cow? I am amazed at the
incompleteness of my growth when I and a fellow-creature stand dumbly
before each other without one glimmer of comprehension, locked and
barred from all friendship and intercourse--"

"Shawn," cried the sergeant.

"Don't interrupt," said the Philosopher; "you are always talking.--The
lower animals, as they are foolishly