r 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 than 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 centre and 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 them 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-bye, 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 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 as 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 hence