THE TALKING MOON.

"FLO does not bark at the moon only sometimes, and then she has some reason." I knew Ned Treves, Flo's master, well enough to be sure that, whether the dog had reason or not for barking at the moon, he had some reason for making the assertion. Ned was not quite sixteen, but without being a "calculating boy" I had great respect for his knowledge of arithmetic as superior to my own, and his total want of imagination, in which respect I had the advantage. He was a dry, cold observer with a philosophic turn of mind.

This he proceeded to show by taking it for granted that I could not be expected to credit his assertion unless he gave some proof of it. He was sitting on a log with the dog close to him. He took her up in his arms and held her head facing the full moon, patting her gently as I thought to incite her to bark at it. But Flo would not bark, but when she could not turn her head aside she did her eyes, almost painfully straining them to avoid looking at the conspicuous object. In a minute or two she struggled to get loose as if the position was a very unpleasant one for her. Ned let her loose, when she turned her tail on Luna in a way that was suggestive—I have some imagination, as I implied—suggestive of fear and dislike. At the same time she turned her eyes on Ned doubtfully as if the moon had told him to do what was disagreeable to her. She evidently thought he had acted under some undue influence.

But the explanation was for me.

"Usually she does not take any notice of the moon, and I know she does not want to. I could set her barking at a stranger fast enough, but when it is the moon there is no use saying, 'lie! good dog.' It is no stranger to her; she knows it better than you and I, and behaves to it as she does to nothing else."

Ned indulged in a reflective pause, which I did not inter- rupt.

"We know things," he went on, "that Flo doesn't, and Flo knows things we don't. I don't set up to know where a rat is as she does, and Pm sure she knows something about the moon we don't."

I made a silly observation.

"Maybe she smells a rat in the moon."

Ned ignored me.

"There she is now," he said, "with her tail to it, and

whatever she knows she knows as well that way as if she was looking at it."

"So do we," I said; "what we know about the moon we know for the most part behind her back."

"So we do," was the answer. "We know that the moon is a great big lump of rocks, a quarter of a million of miles— isn't it?—away from us, shining with the light of the sun on it. That's what I learned about it, and with that in my head I can't think of it any other way. But Flo doesn't know it that way ; she must know it in a way of her own. She knows it, but not the way we know it."

The reasoning was unanswerable and prompted the question- " Have you any idea bow she knows it ?"

"You watch her now and stop talking. Our talking inter- feres with the moon."

Flo was sitting with her back to the orb, shining apparently so tranquilly. Her head was resting on her paws, but her eyes, wide open, glanced about as if she heard something that annoyed her; there was an angry, irritated look in them. Suddenly she raised her head and held it erect with the irritation in her eyes still more marked. Just as suddenly she replaced her head in its previous position, obviously an attempt at self-control which the strained look in her eyes belied. In a moment or two, however, she rose on her feet and faced about at the moon, showing her teeth with a snarl She seemed transformed all at once from being an amiable, playful creature into a vicious, ill-tempered cur. Totally dis- regarding us, she walked hither and thither, her head always turned on the moon with a look of concentrated rage. There was no sign of fear in her now, it was all ungovernable fury. She sat still—still for a moment, looking steadily at it, and then, as if it scoffed at her, burst into a prolonged fit of barking and capered about frantically. Withal there was a painful

note of impotent anger in her bark as if she knew she was being mocked with impunity.

"I don't think," Ned said, "that the moon talks to her the way you talk to me, but she would never behave in that way if she did not take it as saying nasty things to her. I couldn't make her angry, no matter what I said, and she does not notice strangers. I really believe that the moon has some way of making her mad which we don't understand. Hie! Flo, what's the matter with you?"

Whatever was the matter with Flo, she was so absorbed in herself and in earnest that she paid no attention to her master.

"It's just as if the moon was telling her to bite me, to kill me if she could, or do something she hates doing, that she knows is wrong."

"You know that the moon has been charged from time out of mind with making human beings lunatics, but no one believes that now."

As usual, Ned answered me so as to show that he had turned the question over in his mind previously.

"No one believes it because he knows so much about the moon that he thinks that there is no room for believing any- thing. When men knew nothing about it, as Flo knows nothing, of course they understood it as she does."

Flo had gone behind the log on which her master sat and resumed her previous posture with her head resting on her paws. That was quite unlike her. When Ned and I discussed abstruse problems she was always an interested auditor, glancing intelligently from one to the other of mi. Now she was so deeply preoccupied with the conduct of the moon that she seemed quite unconscious of our presence.

"I thought for a long time," Ned went on, "that she was simply foolish, but that was because I paid no attention to her. When I did mind her I soon found that she behaved to the moon as she behaved to nothing else, and always in the same way, as if it wanted her to do what she did not like. She never yet barked at the sun, and knows dead things from living, and things that interfere with her from things that don't as well as you and I. But I notice now that she is getting to keep from looking at the moon. What she wants now is to go into the house and hide herself."

"The question is whether the moon itself really affects her, as if it was talking to her or in some way communicating with her, or whether it is only what she thinks herself."

"Flo does not think or know," was the answer, "as we think and know. Her thinking goes along with her listening and looking. I don't suppose that when she is in the house in the dark she knows that there is such a thing as the moon."

"If so," I said, "the influence, or whatever it is, of the moon does not reach her in the house."

"That's just what I can't say. I know when I bring her into the house now she will be uneasy and angry, but I am not sure that she would not be so if she had been in the house all this time. I have got to know the exact way she barks at the moon, and she does so sometimes in the house, and though it is confused and uncertain I know the note of it quite well. I am sure the moon makes her bark sometimes when she does not see it. She does not bark at nothing, and she has only one kind of bark for the moon. It looks somehow as if she heard it 'talking.'" "Perhaps," I said flippantly, "the moon itself is a ]unatic. It broke off in a mad fit from the earth, and from what I saw of it in a telescope it looks like a fitting home for demons and distracted spirits."

Flo had got up again and was capering about, barking with frantic rage at the placid-looking abode of demons. But Ned picked her up in his arms and with some difficulty held her head averted from the object.

"Now, Flo," he said, "you have have had more of that than is good for you, old girL You see we don't mind it one bit."

The little dog, though uneasy, seemed half ashamed of herself and whined somewhat piteously, but not without reproachful side glances at what had offended her.

"I am not so sure," Ned said thoughtfully. "If the moon talks to Flo, maybe it talks to human beings too without their knowing it is talking to them. What does it say to you, old girl F" Flo understood something besides the moon, sympathy with a troubled mind, and gratefully licked Ned's hand. But Ned had the true spirit of a scientific observer. "Do you know," he said, "I have tried Beppo, my other little dog, Flo's brother, with the moon. He never barks at it, and I could never make him bark at it. But he under- stands it somehow just as Flo does. When I put him down facing it he looks at it just as if it said something to him, looks at it as if it was another dog he does not care much about. After taking his look he always stretches out his paws, lays his head on them, puts out his tongue at it, and goes off in a kind of a doze. What is curious, he never minds me then when I call him; I take him up, carry him away and shake him, though be is not quite asleep. When he opens his eyes he seems not to know where he is."

"Now you are proving," I said, "that if the moon does not talk it exerts an influence on Beppo. You have heard about animals and men being hypnotized?"

"Oh, yes, I have seen the thing done and read about it, but how does it come that Flo is not hypnotized ? "

"Can you answer the question yourself, Ned?"

"The only answer I can give is that Flo is hypnotized. What I think is that hypnotism means more than putting one asleep. The moon puts Beppo to sleep and makes Flo dance and make a fool of herself against her wilL But I have watched other dogs as well as Beppo and Flo. If, now, you had a dozen dogs, decent, well-behaved doge, there, facing the moon, you might think that a mad dog had got among them, setting them all by the ears."

"Perhaps," I said, " it is the moon that makes parliaments and governments conduct public business as they do, setting decent, sensible people by the ears. The moon says, in some way we don't understand, 'Votes for Women,' and most of us, not caring three straws for votes for women, or men either, would go to sleep if we were let. That would be no fun for the moon, and she sets us all, half awake, at each other with the help of a dog too much awake and excited to have any sense left. We finish by putting that dog in Parliament instead of leaving him in moonshine."

"I know nothing about that," Ned said, with a decided air. "All I know is that dogs have a way of understanding the moon we have not, and I'm not going to say that their understanding of it has no sense or meaning in it."

W. R. MICDERMOTT.