“You will find the whole account in that old paper called the Recorder of Self-Inflicted Miseries; there, from time to time, all the accidents that happened to what were called steamboats, locomotive engines, stages, &c. were registered. You will see that in the year 1860, during the months of August and September, more than ten thousand dogs were seized with that horrible disease, and that upward of one hundred thousand people fell victims to it. It raged with the greatest fury in New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore; and but for the timely destruction of every dog in the South, ten times the number of human beings would have perished. The death from hydrophobia is as disgraceful to a corporate body, as if the inhabitants had died of thirst, when good water was near them.” “This was horrible; the consternation of the people must have been very great—equal to what was felt during the cholera. Did you ever read of that terrible disease?” “No, I do not recollect it——Oh, yes, now I remember to have read something of it—but that came in a shape that was not easy to foresee. But dogs were always known to be subject to this awful disease, and therefore encouraging their increase was shameful. Posterity had cause enough to curse the memory of their ancestors, for having entailed such a dreadful scourge upon them. The panic, it seems, was so great, that to this day children are more afraid of looking at a dog, for they are kept among wild beasts as a curiosity, than at a Bengal tiger.” “I confess I never could discover in what their usefulness consisted. They were capable of feeling a strong attachment to their master, and had a show of reason and intelligence, but it amounted to very little in its effects. It was very singular, but I used frequently to observe, that men were oftentimes more gentle and kind to their dogs than to their wives and children; and much better citizens would these children have made, if their fathers had bestowed half the pains in _breaking them in_, and in training them, that they did on their dogs. It was a very rare circumstance if a theft was prevented by the presence of a dog; when such a thing _did_ occur, every paper spoke of it, and the anecdote was never forgotten. But had they been ever so useful, so necessary to man’s comfort, nothing could compensate or overbalance the evil to which he was liable from this disease. Were the dogs all destroyed at once?” “Yes; the papers say, that by the first of October there was but one dog to be seen, and the owner of that had to pay a fine of three thousand dollars, and be imprisoned for one year at hard labour. When you consider the horrible sufferings of so many people, and all to gratify a pernicious as well as foolish fondness for an animal, we cannot wonder at the severity of the punishment.”