ful 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 think 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 they 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