eiled representatives of the sublime laws of the universe, are
concerned solely with us. These poor brothers of our animal life, that
are so calmly, so confidently resigned, would appear to know many
things that we have forgotten; they are the tranquil custodians of the
secret that we seek so anxiously. It is evident that animals, and
notably domestic animals, have also a kind of destiny. They too know
what prolonged and gratuitous happiness means; they also have
encountered the persistent misfortune for which no cause can be found.
They have the same right as we to speak of their star, their good or
bad luck, their prosperity or disaster. Compare the fate of the
cab-horse, that ends its days at the knacker's, after having passed
through the hands of a hundred brutal and nameless masters, with that
of the thorough-bred which dies of old age in the stable of a
kind-hearted master; and from the point of view of justice (unless we
accept the Buddhist theory, that life in this world is the reward or
punishment of an anterior existence) explanation is as completely
lacking as in the case of the man whom chance has reduced to poverty or
raised to wealth. There is, in Flanders, a breed of draught-dogs upon
which destiny alternately lavishes her favour and her spite. Some will
be bought by a butcher, and lead a magnificent life. The work is
trifling: in the morning, harnessed four abreast, they draw a light
cart to the slaughter-house, and at night, galloping joyously,
triumphantly, home through the narrow streets of the ancient towns with
their tiny, lit-up gables, bring it back, overflowing with meat.
Between-times there is leisure, and marvellous leisure, among the rats
and the waste of the slaughter-house. They are copiously fed, they are
fat, they shine like seals, and taste in its fulness the only happiness
dreamed of by the simple and ferreting instinct of the honest dog. But
their unfortunate brethren of the same litter, that the lame
sand-pedlar buys, or the old collector of household refuse, or the
needy peasant with his great, cruel clogs--these are chained to heavy
carts or shapeless barrows; they are filthy, mangy, hairless,
emaciated, starving; and follow till they die the circles of a hell
into which they were thrust by a few coppers dropped into some horny
palm. And, in a world less directly subject to man, there must
evidently be partridges, pheasants, deer, hares, which have no luck,
which never escap