“My dog knew as well as I did when she was on the turn. Before she broke
out he would give a howl and bolt. How he knew it was a mystery to me,
but the sure and certain knowledge of it would wake him up out of his
soundest sleep, and would give a howl and bolt. At such times I wished I
was him.” After the death of child and wife, he says: “Me and my dog was
all the company left in the cart now, and the dog learned to give a
short bark when they wouldn’t bid, and to give another and a nod of his
head when I asked him ‘Who said half a crown?’ He attained to an immense
height of popularity, and, I shall always believe, taught himself
entirely out of his own head to growl at any person in the crowd that
bid as low as sixpence. But he got to be well on in years, and one night
when I was convulsing York with the spectacles he took a convulsion on
his own account, upon the very footboard by me, and it finished him.”
Mr. Laurence Hutton, in the St. Nicholas, has lately expressed his
sentiments about dogs, as follows:
“It was Dr. John Brown, of Edinburgh, I think, who spoke in sincere
sympathy of the man who “led a dog-less life.” It was Mr. “Josh
Billings,” I know, who said that in the whole history of the world there
is but one thing that money can not buy—to wit, the wag of a dog’s tail.
And it was Prof. John C. Van Dyke who declared the other day, in
reviewing the artistic career of Landseer, that he made his dogs too
human. It was the great Creator himself who made dogs too human—so human
that sometimes they put humanity to shame.
“I have been the friend and confidant of three dogs, who helped to
humanize me for the space of a quarter of a century, and who had souls
to be saved, I am sure, and when I cross the Stygian River I expect to
find on the other shore a trio of dogs wagging their tails almost off in
their joy at my coming, and with honest tongues hanging out to lick my
hands and my feet. And then I am going, with these faithful, devoted
dogs at my heels, to talk dogs over with Dr. John Brown, Sir Edward
Landseer, and Mr. Josh Billings.”
Do dogs have souls—a spark of life that after death lives on elsewhere?
Many have hoped so, from Wesley to the little boy who has lost his
cherished comrade.
It is certain that dogs show qualities that in a man would be called
reason, quick apprehension, presence of mind, courage, self-abnegation,
affection unto death.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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