“Col.  Coffin, my name is.  Briggs.  I want to get your opinion about a little point of law.  Now, colonel, s’posin’ you lived up the ’pike here a half a mile, next door to a man named Johnson.  And s’posin’ you and Johnson was to get into an argument about the human intellect, and you was to say to Johnson that a splendid illustration of the superiority of the human intellect was to be found in the power of the human eye to restrain the ferocity of a wild animal.  And s’posin’ Johnson was to remark that that was all bosh, because nobody could hold a wild animal with the human eye, and you should declare that you could hold the savagest beast that was ever born if you could once fix your gaze on him.

“Well, then, s’posin’ Johnson was to say he’d bet a hundred dollars he could bring a tame animal that you couldn’t hold with your eye, and you was to take him up on it, and Johnson was to ask you to come down to his place to settle the bet.  You’d go, we’ll say, and Johnson’d wander round to the back of the house and pretty soon come front again with a dog bigger’n any four decent dogs ought to be.  And then s’posin’ Johnson’d let go of that dog and set him on you, and he’d come at you like a sixteen-inch shell out of a howitzer, and you’d get scary about it and try to hold the dog with your eye, and couldn’t.  And s’posin’ you’d suddenly conclude that maybe your kind of an eye wasn’t calculated to hold that kind of a dog, and you’d conclude to run for a plum tree in order to have a chance to collect your thoughts, and to try to reflect what sort of an eye would be best calculated to mollify that sort of a dog.  You ketch my idea, of course?

“Very well, then; s’posin you’d take your eye off of that dog, Johnson, mind you, all the time hissing him on and laughing, and you’d turn and rush for the tree, and begin to swarm up as fast as you could.  Well, sir, s’posin’ just as you got three feet from the ground Johnson’s dog would grab you by the leg and hold on like a vise, shaking you until you nearly lost your hold.  And s’posin’ Johnson was to stand there and holloa, “Fix your eye on him, Briggs!  Why don’t you manifest the power of the human intellect?” and so on, howling out ironical remarks like those; and s’posin’ he kept that dog on that leg until he made you swear to pay the bet, and then at last had to pry the dog off with a hot poker, bringing away at the same time some of your flesh in the dog’s mouth, so that you had to be carried home on a stretcher, and to hire several doctors to keep you from dying with lockjaw.

“S’posin’ this, what I want to know is, couldn’t you sue Johnson for damages and make him pay heavily for what that dog did?  That’s what I want to get at.”

The colonel thought for a minute and then said, “Well, Mr. Briggs, I don’t think I could.  If I agreed to let Johnson set the dog at me, I should be a party to the transaction and I could not recover.”

“Do you mean to say that the law won’t make that infernal scoundrel Johnson suffer for letting his dog eat me up?”