24 A BOOK OF MORTALS 



horses — except in war when their high courage and 

 marvellous obedience seem to render them reckless — show a 

 curious prescience of the presence of Death, and will detect 

 it before their riders. 



But, curiously enough, it is when the affections have 

 been roused beyond the normal, as is the case between dog 

 and man, that we see the most unmistakable appreciation 

 of what Death means. Only a day or two ago, indeed, a 

 doctor — all unwitting of this record — told me as a curious 

 fact that he had been obliged to banish a dog from a sick 

 room where as yet a hope that was hopeless had to be kept 

 up, because " though I can blind the others, I can't deceive 

 the dog. He knows and howls." 



And where this supreme affection exists, a notable 

 change comes over the instinct which, as a rule, bids the 

 beasts that perish creep away to some dark still place where 

 in all loneliness they may find the Great Darkness, the 

 Great Stillness. 



The little dachshund puppy to whom this book is 

 dedicated, showed this change to its fullest. Never happy 

 in health or sickness without the sight, touch, smell of the 

 person he had elected to love, he finally cuddled down to 

 death in her arms, his last complaint, made half an hour 

 before he died, ending in a big sigh of content when the 

 screen set to shade him was removed and so he could see 

 dimly — despite the sunlight — his beloved. 



Nor is this desire in Death for the companionship of 

 man and man only, peculiar to the dog — who in some ways 

 ought to be put out of the category of evidence. Most 

 animals whose lives have touched human lives show a like 

 inversion of instinct. 



