as 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 w