as more
temperamentally excitable and explosive than his blood-brother Jerry,
while his father and mother were a sedate old couple indeed compared with
him. Far more than mature Jerry, was mature Michael playful and
rowdyish. His ebullient spirits were always on tap to spill over on the
slightest provocation, and, as he was afterwards to demonstrate, he could
weary a puppy with play. In short, Michael was a merry soul.

"Soul" is used advisedly. Whatever the human soul may be--informing
spirit, identity, personality, consciousness--that intangible thing
Michael certainly possessed. His soul, differing only in degree, partook
of the same attributes as the human soul. He knew love, sorrow, joy,
wrath, pride, self-consciousness, humour. Three cardinal attributes of
the human soul are memory, will, and understanding; and memory, will, and
understanding were Michael's.

Just like a human, with his five senses he contacted with the world
exterior to him. Just like a human, the results to him of these contacts
were sensations. Just like a human, these sensations on occasion
culminated in emotions. Still further, like a human, he could and did
perceive, and such perceptions did flower in his brain as concepts,
certainly not so wide and deep and recondite as those of humans, but
concepts nevertheless.

Perhaps, to let the human down a trifle from such disgraceful identity of
the highest life-attributes, it would be well to admit that Michael's
sensations were not quite so poignant, say in the matter of a
needle-thrust through his foot as compared with a needle-thrust through
the palm of a hand. Also, it is admitted, when consciousness suffused
his brain with a thought, that the thought was dimmer, vaguer than a
similar thought in a human brain. Furthermore, it is admitted that
never, never, in a million lifetimes, could Michael have demonstrated a
proposition in Euclid or solved a quadratic equation. Yet he was capable
of knowing beyond all peradventure of a doubt that three bones are more
than two bones, and that ten dogs compose a more redoubtable host than do
two dogs.

One admission, however, will not be made, namely, that Michael could not
love as devotedly, as wholeheartedly, unselfishly, madly,
self-sacrificingly as a human. He did so love--not because he was
Michael, but because he was a dog.

Michael had loved Captain Kellar more than he loved his own life. No
more than Jerry for Skipper, would he h