“Through all Tuesday I lay tossing with pain.  Fever was in every pulse; my brain was seething, burning lava.  I thought and dreamed of nothing but mangy curs and ‘dirty dogs.’  The night gathered again, and the rumbling of the carriages and the thousand voices that break the stillness of a thronged city, died away into silence.  The lights were extinguished, but again that horrible bark! bark! broke the hush of midnight, and worse than all, the quickened senses of fever heard it answered from away over on Arbor Hill; and again away up in State street; and yet again over in Lydius, and still again away down by the river.  The East, the North, the West and the South had a voice, and it was all concentrated in a ceaseless, senseless, idiotic bark.  I counted again the tickings of the clock, and each swing of the pendulum ended in a bark!  As I lay there in the silence and desolation, the restless, tossing anguish of fever, those dogs gathered together in State at the crossing of Eagle, just above my boarding-house, and barked!  They came under my windows, and barked!  They looked in between the curtains, and barked!  They came into my room, and there on the sofa, on the rocking-chair, on the table, on the mantelpiece, on the ottoman, on the stove, and on the top of the old clock, was a dog; and each barked! and barked!  I saw them all through the darkness, plain as if it were noonday.  They were ‘dirty dogs,’ filthy brutes, ill-favored mangy curs all, and there they sat and barked at the clock, barked at the mirror, at the stove, barked at one another and at me, with the same monotonous, meaningless, idiotic bow, wow! as of old.

“I had two rifles and a double-barrelled fowling-piece, sitting in the corner of the parlor adjoining our sleeping-room, the gifts of valued friends.  My wife, wearied with the day’s watching, had sunk into slumber on the bed beside me.  I woke her gently.

“‘Make no noise,’ I said, ‘but bring me the guns; do it carefully.’

“‘What on earth do you want of the guns?’ she inquired in alarm.

“‘Don’t you see those infernal dogs?’ I answered, ’bring me the guns, and I’ll make short work with the howling curs.’

“‘Why, husband,’ said she, ‘there are no dogs here,’ and as she lighted the gas the curs vanished away.  But I saw them in the darkness.  It was only when the light flashed through the room, that they fled from it, and I heard them barking in response to each other through all the long night, till the dawn crept over the world again.

“Years ago, I saved a boy from the meshes of the law, in which his evil ways had involved him.  I admonished him of the end towards which he was hastening.  I showed him that the path he was treading led to destruction, and he left it, as he said, forever.  He apprenticed himself to a useful trade, and is now an intelligent mechanic.  Out of his time, an industrious, sober youth of two and twenty, supporting by his industry, his mother and sister in comfort and