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 think 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 the came back to it again it bored me,and I went to sleep.
Pretty soon it was spring,and sunny and pleasant and lovely,and the sweet mother and the children patted me and the puppy good-by,and went away on a journey and a visit to their kin,and the master wasn't any company for us,but we played together and had good times,and the servants were kind and friendly,so we got along quite happily and counted the days and waited for the family.