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 they came back
to it again it bored me, and I went to sleep.
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