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 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,