Tray

( Dramatic Idyls , 1879.) Three bards sing each a song of a hero; but the bard who sings of Olaf the Dane, and he who tells of the hero standing unflinching on the precipice, have not their song rewarded here: the place of honour is reserved by the poet for a dog story. Tray was the poet’s hero of the three. A beggar child fell into the Seine in Paris. The bystanders prudently bethought themselves of their families ere risking their lives to save her. While the people were wondering how the child was to be extricated, “a mere instinctive dog” jumped over the balustrade and brought her to land. The people applauded the dog, who had no sooner deposited his burden on the shore than he was off again, apparently to save another child whom nobody had seen fall. The dog was so long under the water that he was thought to have been carried away by the current; but in a few minutes he was seen swimming to land with the child’s doll in his mouth. The people began to pride themselves on man’s po e ion of reason, and to vaunt the superiority of our race over that of the dog. Meanwhile Tray trotted off; till one of the crowd, with a larger share of “reason” than the rest, bade his servant go and catch the animal for him, that, by expenditure “of half an hour and eighteen-pence,” he might vivisect it at the physiological laboratory and see “how brain secretes dog’s soul.” This was poor Tray’s reward at the hands of humanity, endowed with the “reason” which had been denied to the brave and faithful little brain of the “lower animal.” (See Vivisection .)