“I don’t know when I have laughed at anything as much as I did at him the other day,” said Miss Laura.  “Uncle asked me if I had ever heard of such a thing as a jealous ox, and I said no.  He said, ’Come to the barnyard, and I’ll show you one.’  The oxen were both there, Duke with his broad face, and Bright so much sharper and more intelligent looking.  Duke was drinking at the trough there, and uncle said:  ’Just look at him.  Isn’t he a great, fat, self-satisfied creature, and doesn’t he look as if he thought the world owed him a living, and he ought to get it?’ Then he got the card and went up to Bright, and began scratching him.  Duke lifted his head from the trough, and stared at uncle, who paid no attention to him but went on carding Bright, and stroking and petting him.  Duke looked so angry.  He left the trough, and with the water dripping from his lips, went up to uncle, and gave him a push with his horns.  Still uncle took no notice, and Duke almost pushed him over.  Then uncle left off petting Bright, and turned to him.  He said Duke would have treated him roughly, if he hadn’t.  I never saw a creature look as satisfied as Duke did, when uncle began to card him.  Bright didn’t seem to care, and only gazed calmly at them.”

“I’ve seen Duke do that again and again,” said Mrs. Wood.  “He’s the most jealous animal that we have, and it makes him perfectly miserable to have your uncle pay attention to any animal but him.  What queer creatures these dumb brutes are.  They’re pretty much like us in most ways.  They’re jealous and resentful, and they can love or hate equally well—­and forgive, too, for that matter; and suffer—­how they can suffer, and so patiently, too.  Where is the human being that would put up with the tortures that animals endure and yet come out so patient?”

“Nowhere,” said Miss Laura, in a low voice; “we couldn’t do it.”

“And there doesn’t seem to be an animal,” Mrs. Wood went on, “no matter how ugly and repulsive it is, but what has some lovable qualities.  I have just been reading about some sewer rats, Louise Michel’s rats——­”

“Who is she?” asked Miss Laura.

“A celebrated Frenchwoman, my dear child, ’the priestess of pity and vengeance,’ Mr. Stead calls her.  You are too young to know about her, but I remember reading of her in 1872, during the Commune troubles in France.  She is an anarchist, and she used to wear a uniform, and shoulder a rifle, and help to build barricades.  She was arrested and sent as a convict to one of the French penal colonies.  She has a most wonderful love for animals in her heart, and when she went home she took four cats with her.  She was put into prison again in France and took the cats with her.  Rats came about her cell and she petted them and taught her cats to be kind to them.  Before she got the cats thoroughly drilled one of them bit a rat’s paw.  Louise nursed the rat till it got well, then let it down by a string from her window.  It went back to its sewer, and,