When dire sickness smites them, they do not hang about, craving sympathy and calling for endless attention.

All they want is to get out of the way,--well out of the way, into the woods and swamps and mountains; where they may wrestle with their life-or-death problem in their own primitive manner; and where, if need be, they may die alone and peacefully, without troubling anyone else.
Especially is this true with dogs.

If their malady is likely to affect the brain and to turn them savage, they make every possible attempt to escape from home and to be as far away from their masters as may be, before the crisis shall goad them into attacking those they love.
And, when some such suffering beast is seen, on his way to solitude, we humans prove our humanity by raising the idiotic bellow of "Mad dog!" and by chasing and torturing the victim.

All this, despite proof that not one sick dog in a thousand, thus assailed, has any disease which is even remotely akin to rabies.
Next to vivisection, no crime against helpless animals is so needlessly and foolishly cruel as the average mad-dog chase.
Which is a digression; but which may or may not enable you to keep your head, next time a mad-dog scare sweeps your own neighborhood.
Down the middle of the dusty street trotted the sick mongrel.

Five minutes earlier, he had escaped from the damp cellar in which his owner had imprisoned him when first he fell ill.