A DOG-STORY.
[TO THE EDITOR OF TEE "SPECTATOR."]
SIR,—A few days ago I took my setter to an inn in the country. Before going to my room I went out, leaving the dog and my traps in the waiting-room, neglecting to inform him of my intention to return. He broke away and went to the room which I had occupied two years before, so the people in the house informed me. I reached the place by the Old Colony Railroad, upon the line of which I live in summer, and over which the dog had often travelled. Nearly adjoining the station, on the same side of the same street, is the station of the Boston and Albany Railroad, on which he had occasionally travelled, but not for many months. He walks with me daily from my house to my office, and frequently walked with me to and from the Old Colony Railroad Station, but never to my knowledge had he been with me over the third side of the triangle, from the railway station to my house, except in a carriage. On the day after my return I left my dog in my house and went off for a drive. My daughter, to whom he is attached, afterwards went out, leaving the dog alone. He was so uneasy that a maid let him out. He disappeared shortly afterwards, and was brought back to my house in about an hour, having been found on one of the carriages about to leave the Boston and Albany Station, two miles away. By a strange co- incidence he was there discovered by the gentleman with whom I had just been shooting, so that there is the possible explanation of his having caught the scent in the Albany Station of some one he knew to be a friend. The dog did not come up to him, but when recognised by him was being ejected from an outgoing train. This perhaps is hardly worth publishing, although these evidences of thought upon an animal's part are sometimes to me more interesting when the results are imperfect than they are when the results of the intelligence are so astonishing as to be almost incredible. The dog is constantly turned out from the house to run at will and has never run away before. My office at the time he ran away was still open. What the process of reasoning was by which he assumed that I was not at the office, that I had gone off on another shooting trip without him, how he found his way to the railway station, and when he got there why he did not select the right station, are all matters of interesting conjecture.—I am, Sir, Sc., Boston, Massachusetts, October 26th. W. M.
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