"'I never visit fleas, and seldom do I come to fat and comfortable dogs. I am a lonely Angel, and I have a tremendously long beat to patrol, which I cannot, even if I make haste, complete in less than ten hundred years; therefore, ye are very lucky in being here just as I was passing. But whosoever entertaineth me receiveth always a blessing.'

"So saying, he drew from a pocket in his toga, a little phial containing a thin and colorless fluid, and bidding us hold up our faces, he, with his finger, moistened our eyes with the fluid. Instantly, our eyes were endowed with a marvellous seeing power, and our brains seemed to be filled with lightning flashes. 'See ye any better now?' said he. ' Infinitely,' said we; ' why, we see what a lot of unspeakable idiots, and wooden-headed fools we are, not to have seen what a lot of utterly useless, superfluous and ruinously exhausting fleas we have been carrying all these years.' 'Just so,' said the Angel. 'Now, take this phial, and what hungry dog's eyes soever ye shall moisten with the fluid, shall instantly receive power to see through a ladder.'

"We thanked him, and implored him to tarry with us and abide and take something; but he was grieved, and said he was no police dog, and had several stars to visit before midnight. And he vanished from our sight.

"So we took the little phial, which was labelled, 'Dilute Solution of Plain Common Sense; one drop, applied to the eyes of a very hungry dog, warranted to make him see through a flea,' and tried it on every hungry dog we met; and the result was, as the Angel foretold, that every one was instantly restored to the most exalted sanity, and saw clear through the humbug of the whole dirty useless gang of you, your Bamboozling Committee, your Flags, Statues, and lying Patriotism, your blas-phemy of Liberty, and cant of Freedom, and everything else that there is of you.

"All these dogs with me have had their eyes touched with the Solution, and the epidemic, as your fool Bamboozlers and Emdees call it, has run through three-fourths of Canisville, and the country roundabout "Now, therefore, we have come hither to propose a new modus vivendi, some way of living without you; but before we do that we desire to express to you our gratitude for all the kind things you have done and have this night proposed to do.

"We thank you for having sent us the Gospel of Earthly Contentment and Future Reward. As ye were the first, efficient and only cause of our discontent, the robbers of all our means of growth, physical comfort and intelligence, ye owed us something as a set-off; but seeing that ye offered us only a very far distant and uncertain intangibility of future recompense - that ye yourselves had no power to grant - while what ye took from us by FRAUD and mental chloroforming was something real, actual and of present tangible value, we have decided not to accept your promissory note that is to be redeemed some in-definite time in next eternity. We believe that now is the accepted time for those who toil to get their reward, and that now is the accepted time for all idlers and suckers to starve to death. We believe that it is blasphemy to neglect the earth that is for a heaven that may be.

"We believe that God is the God of justice and that he has punished us for doing ourselves the injustice of being robbed, and for doing you the unkindness and injustice of helping you to live in demoralizing idleness on unearned wealth.

"Therefore, out of pure love for ourselves, and a consuming anxiety for your welfare, we will take the full reward of our labor now, and turn over to you all the hopes and realities of future reward and glory which ye make so much of. Ye have taught us the ineffable blessedness of poverty and trust in God; of empty bellies and the contemplation of other-world bliss.

"Therefore, be it enacted, and it is hereby enacted, by us dogs now restored to our senses, that from the passage of this Act, i. e. now, ye fleas, suckers, robbers and poisoners, shall have all your privileges as idle drags upon our prosperity taken away from you, and ye shall henceforth be endowed and crowned with all those sacred and inalienable rights to starve and die, to sink or swim, which are now the great and particular endowment of dogs throughout the world.

"But in lieu thereof, and as a set-off, we make over to you in fee simple, and to your heirs and assigns forever, all those mansions in the sky, and the grounds thereto appertaining; all those sweet fields of Eden and the sweet rest to be found there; all those harps and crowns of gold, the robes and palms and glories and pleasures forever more, and all the sweetness and light and satisfaction, etc., etc., etc. These we give, grant and convey to you in the same disinterested spirit as that in which you bequeathed them to us.

"Go, then, in peace, and, rich in all the wealth of future hope, may you be happy. Heretofore, ye have taken our earthly things and pretended to give us in exchange heavenly things. We will now re-exchange them, and while ye are enjoying the strange new bliss of earning your earthly things, so there is nothing to prevent us, while enjoying our earthly rights, from looking forward to the good things of the future."

And the fleas, at the pronunciation of this sentence, fell into a grievous terror, and bewailed the hard fate that had overtaken them; and said that life without wealth and leisure would be but penal servitude; and none of them seemed to take any comfort in this Heavenly Inheritance. Yea, some of them, at this reversal of fortune, went insane, and many of them saying, that if a "title clear to mansions in the skies" was all that was left of the wreck of their fortunes, they might as well be dead, took one tremendous jump and went out and drowned themselves.