210 The Carntvora. 
Suspicion having fallen on him, he was called into the study, 
and ordered to produce them immediately. He promptly 
obeyed, and laid them down at his master’s feet, who, for sole 
punishment, administered a solemn rebuke, looking and speak- 
ing exactly as if he had been addressing an offending 
parishioner. He even remembered that he wound up with an 
impressive movement of his hand. and with the words, ‘and 
now I leave the matter to your conscience.’ I do not believe 
that the culprit understood what was said, but the tone and 
manner affected him so much that he pined away, and died 
very soon afterwards, refusing to be comforted.” For my own 
part, I am scarcely disposed to accept the inference drawn in 
the last sentence, although remorse is certainly exhibited by 
dogs, whence we may with confidence infer their possession 
of the moral sense. 
The similarity of the mental processes, in ourselves and 
animals, may be seen in their behaviour when under the in- 
fluence of abnormal states of mind. To them, as to us, the 
unknown and mysterious is also the terrible; and they may 
even, as I shall show presently, be the victims of superstition. 
One of my retrievers could be made miserable by working on 
his superstitions. I played a practical joke on the poor 
fellow once, which upset him for some days afterwards. Hav- 
ing stuffed a suit of my own clothes in the form of a guy, 
and provided it with a mask, painted in tolerable resemblance 
to my face, and put on its head a cabbage tree hat, which I 
was accustomed to wear, I instructed a friend to set up this 
effigy in the porch, just outside the hall door, some two hours 
or so after I had left the house. At dinner time, when I 
was in the habit of returning, my friend knocked at the door, 
and the dog, expecting to see me, ran out, and jumped up at 
the figure—to welcome, as he thought, his master. But the 
uncanny thing neither moved nor spoke. The dog gazed at 
it a moment, then dashed up stairs in terror, and hid himself 
under my bed. He had expected to see his master. These 
were the familiar clothes, with the well-known straw hat, but 
