Page:Saunders - Beautiful Joe, 1893.djvu/134

Rh to-morrow I shall shoot him. Something's got to be done or he'll be biting some one."

"Uncle," said Miss Laura, "people don't always die when they are bitten by dogs, do they?"

"No, certainly not," replied Mr. Wood. "In my humble opinion there's a great lot of nonsense talked about the poison of a dog's bite and people dying of hydrophobia. Ever since I was born I've had dogs snap at me, and stick their teeth in my flesh; and I've never had a symptom of hydrophobia, and never intend to have. I believe half the people that are bitten by dogs frighten themselves into thinking they are fatally poisoned. I was reading the other day about the policemen in a big city in England that have to catch stray dogs, and dogs supposed to be mad, and all kinds of dogs, and they get bitten over and over again, and never think anything about it. But let a lady or gentleman walking along the street have a dog bite them, and they worry themselves till their blood is in a fever, and they have to hurry across to France to get Pasteur to cure them. They imagine they've got hydrophobia, and they've got it because they imagine it. I believe if I fixed my attention on that right thumb of mine, and thought I had a sore there, and picked at it and worried it, in a short time a sore would come, and I'd be off to the doctor to have it cured. At the same time, dogs have no business to bite, and I don't recommend any one to get bitten."

"But, uncle," said Miss Laura, "isn't there such a thing as hydrophobia?"

"Oh, yes, I dare say there is. I believe that a careful examination of the records of deaths reported in Boston from hydrophobia for the space of thirty-two years, shows that two people actually died from it. Dogs are like all