sanction that. I hate dogs."

"Why do you hate them?" asked Mrs. Morris, gently.

"They are such dirty things; they always smell and have vermin on them."

"A dog," said Mrs. Morris, "is something like a child. If you want it
clean and pleasant, you have got to keep it so. This dog's skin is as
clean as yours or mine. Hold still, Joe," and she brushed the hair on my
back the wrong way, and showed Mrs. Montague how pink and free from dust
my skin was.

Mrs. Montague looked at me more kindly, and even held out the tips of
her fingers to me. I did not lick them. I only smelled them, and she
drew her hand back again.

"You have never been brought in contact with the lower creation as I
have," said Mrs. Morris; "just let me tell you, in a few words, what a
help dumb animals have been to me in the up-bringing of my children--my
boys, especially. When I was a young married woman, going about the
slums of New York with my husband, I used to come home and look at my
two babies as they lay in their little cots, and say to him, 'What are
we going to do to keep these children from selfishness--the curse of the
world?'

"'Get them to do something for somebody outside themselves,' he always
said. And I have tried to act on that principle. Laura is naturally
unselfish. With her tiny, baby fingers, she would take food from her own
mouth and put it into Jack's, if we did not watch her. I have never had
any trouble with her. But the boys were born selfish, tiresomely,