“Come back to us—­oh, come back to us, and forgive—­it is all so sad without our—­”

I broke in with such a grateful little yelp, and the next moment Sadie was plunging and stumbling through the darkness and the lumber and shouting for the family to hear, “She’s found, she’s found!”

The days that followed—­well, they were wonderful.  The mother and Sadie and the servants—­why, they just seemed to worship me.  They couldn’t seem to make me a bed that was fine enough; and as for food, they couldn’t be satisfied with anything but game and delicacies that were out of season; and every day the friends and neighbors flocked in to hear about my heroism—­that was the name they called it by, and it means agriculture.  I remember my mother pulling it on a kennel once, and explaining it in that way, but didn’t say what agriculture was, except that it was synonymous with intramural incandescence; and a dozen times a day Mrs. Gray and Sadie would tell the tale to new-comers, and say I risked my life to say the baby’s, and both of us had burns to prove it, and then the company would pass me around and pet me and exclaim about me, and you could see the pride in the eyes of Sadie and her mother; and when the people wanted to know what made me limp, they looked ashamed and changed the subject, and sometimes when people hunted them this way and that way with questions about it, it looked to me as if they were going to cry.

And this was not all the glory; no, the master’s friends came, a whole twenty of the most distinguished people, and had me in the laboratory, and discussed me as if I was a kind of discovery; and some of them said it was wonderful in a dumb beast, the finest exhibition of instinct they could call to mind; but the master said, with vehemence, “It’s far above instinct; it’s Reason, and many a man, privileged to be saved and go with you and me to a better world by right of its possession, has less of it that this poor silly quadruped that’s foreordained to perish”; and then 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.