"Why do you hate them?" asked Mrs. Morris gently.

"They are such dirty things; they always smell and have vermin on
them."

"A dog," said Mrs. Morris, "is something like a child. If you want
it clean and pleasant, you have got to keep it so. This dog's skin is
as clean as yours or mine. Hold still, Joe," and she brushed the hair
on my back the wrong way, and showed Mrs. Montague how pink
and free from dust my skin was.

Mrs. Montague looked at me more kindly, and even held out the
tips of her fingers to me. I did not lick them. I only smelled them,
and she drew her hand back again.

"You have never been brought in contact with the lower creation
as I have," said Mrs. Morris; "just let me tell you, in a few words,
what a help dumb animals have been to me in the up-bringing of
my children my boys, especially. When I was a young married
woman, going about the slums of New York with my husband, I
used to come home and look at my two babies as they lay in their
little cots, and say to him, 'What are we going to do to keep these
children from selfishness the curse of the world?'

"'Get them to do something for somebody outside themselves,' he
always said. And I have tried to act on that principle. Laura is
naturally unselfish. With her tiny, baby fingers, she would take
food from her own mouth and put it into Jack's, if we did not
watch her. I have never had any trouble with her. But the boys