“No, certainly not,” replied Mr. Wood.  “In my humble opinion there’s a great lot of nonsense talked about the poison of a dog’s bite and people dying of hydrophobia.  Ever since I was born I’ve had dogs snap at me and stick their teeth in my flesh; and I’ve never had a symptom of hydrophobia, and never intend to have.  I believe half the people that are bitten by dogs frighten themselves into thinking they are fatally poisoned.  I was reading the other day about the policemen in a big city in England that have to catch stray dogs, and dogs supposed to be mad, and all kinds of dogs, and they get bitten over and over again, and never think anything about it.  But let a lady or a gentleman walking along the street have a dog bite them, and they worry themselves till their blood is in a fever, and they have to hurry across to France to get Pasteur to cure them.  They imagine they’ve got hydrophobia, and they’ve got it because they imagine it.  I believe if I fixed my attention on that right thumb of mine, and thought I had a sore there, and picked at it and worried it, in a short time a sore would come, and I’d be off to the doctor to have it cured.  At the same time dogs have no business to bite, and I don’t recommend any one to get bitten.”

“But, uncle,” said Miss Laura, “isn’t there such a thing as hydrophobia?”

“Oh, yes; I dare say there is.  I believe that a careful examination of the records of death reported in Boston from hydrophobia for the space of thirty-two years, shows that two people actually died from it.  Dogs are like all other animals.  They’re liable to sickness, and they’ve got to be watched.  I think my horses would go mad if I starved them, or over-fed them, or over-worked them, or let them stand in laziness, or kept them dirty, or didn’t give them water enough.  They’d get some disease, anyway.  If a person owns an animal, let him take care of it, and it’s all right.  If it shows signs of sickness, shut it up and watch it.  If the sickness is incurable, kill it.  Here’s a sure way to prevent hydrophobia.  Kill off all ownerless and vicious dogs.  If you can’t do that, have plenty of water where they can get at it.  A dog that has all the water he wants, will never go mad.  This dog of mine has not one single thing the matter with him but pure ugliness.  Yet, if I let him loose, and he ran through the village with his tongue out, I’ll warrant you there’d be a cry of ‘mad dog!’ However, I’m going to kill him.  I’ve no use for a bad dog.  Have plenty of animals, I say, and treat them kindly, but if there’s a vicious one among them, put it out of the way, for it is a constant danger to man and beast.  It’s queer how ugly some people are about their dogs.  They’ll keep them no matter how they worry other people, and even when they’re snatching the bread out of their neighbors’ mouths.  But I say that is not the fault of the four-legged dog.  A human dog is the worst of all.  There’s a band of sheep-killing dogs here in Riverdale, that