not know me and betray me to the master. I was feeling almost cheerful
now; then suddenly I thought: Why, what would life be without my puppy!
That was despair. There was no plan for me; I saw that; I must say where
I was; stay, and wait, and take what might come–it was not my affair;
that was what life is–my mother had said it. Then–well, then the
calling began again! All my sorrows came back. I said to myself, the
master will never forgive. I did not know what I had done to make him so
bitter and so unforgiving, yet I judged it was something a dog could not
understand, but which was clear to a man and dreadful.
They called and called–days and nights, it seemed to me. So long that
the hunger and thirst near drove me mad, and I recognized that I was
getting very weak. When you are this way you sleep a great deal, and I
did. Once I woke in an awful fright–it seemed to me that the calling
was right there in the garret! And so it was: it was Sadie’s voice, and
she was crying; my name was falling from her lips all broken, poor thing,
and I could not believe my ears for the joy of it when I heard her say:
“Come back to us–oh, come back to us, and forgive–it is all so sad
without our–”
I broke in with SUCH a grateful little yelp, and the next moment Sadie
was plunging and stumbling through the darkness and the lumber and
shouting for the family to hear, “She’s found, she’s found!”
The days that followed–well, they were wonderful. The mother and Sadie
and the servants–why, they just seemed to worship me. They couldn’t
seem to make me a bed that was fine enough; and as for food, they
couldn’t be satisfied with anything but game and delicacies that were out
of season; and every day the friends and neighbors flocked in to hear
about my heroism–that was the name they called it by, and it means
agriculture. I remember my mother pulling it on a kennel once, and
explaining it in that way, but didn’t say what agriculture was, except
that it was synonymous with intramural incandescence; and a dozen times a
day Mrs. Gray and Sadie would tell the tale to new-comers, and say I
risked my life to say the baby’s, and both of us had burns to prove it,
and then the company would pass me around and pet me and exclaim about
me, and you could see the pride in the eyes of Sadie and her mother; and
when the people 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 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