“Did you ever ask yourself the question,” Lady Muriel began, _à propos_ of nothing, “what is the _chief_ advantage of being a Man instead of a Dog?” “No, indeed,” I said: “but I think there are advantages on the _Dog’s_ side of the question, as well.” “No doubt,” she replied, with that pretty mock-gravity that became her so well: “but, on _Man’s_ side, the chief advantage seems to me to consist in _having pockets_! It was borne in upon me—upon _us_, I should say; for my father and I were returning from a walk—only yesterday. We met a dog carrying home a bone. What it wanted it for, I’ve no idea: certainly there was no _meat_ on it——” A strange sensation came over me, that I had heard all this, or something exactly like it, before: and I almost expected her next words to be “perhaps he meant to make a cloak for the winter?” However what she really said was “and my father tried to account for it by some wretched joke about _pro bono publico_. Well, the dog laid down the bone—_not_ in disgust with the pun, which would have shown it to be a dog of taste—but simply to rest its jaws, poor thing! I _did_ pity it so! Won’t you join my _Charitable Association for supplying dogs with pockets_? How would _you_ like to have to carry your walking-stick in your mouth?” Ignoring the difficult question as to the _raison d’être_ of a walking-stick, supposing one had no _hands_, I mentioned a curious instance, I had once witnessed, of reasoning by a dog. A gentleman, with a lady, and child, and a large dog, were down at the end of a pier on which I was walking. To amuse his child, I suppose, the gentleman put down on the ground his umbrella and the lady’s parasol, and then led the way to the other end of the pier, from which he sent the dog back for the deserted articles. I was watching with some curiosity. The dog came racing back to where I stood, but found an unexpected difficulty in picking up the things it had come for. With the umbrella in its mouth, its jaws were so far apart that it could get no firm grip on the parasol. After two or three failures, it paused and considered the matter. Then it put down the umbrella and began with the parasol. Of course that didn’t open its jaws nearly so wide, and it was able to get a good hold of the umbrella, and galloped off in triumph. One couldn’t doubt that it had gone through a real train of logical thought. “I entirely agree with you,” said Lady Muriel: “but don’t orthodox writers condemn that view, as putting Man on the level of the lower animals? Don’t they draw a sharp boundary-line between Reason and Instinct?”