I lifted up his beautiful broad paw which he
was wont to lay on my knee, I held it between my hands, and when I let
it go it fell heavily to the ground. I could not carry him home, and
with bitter tears and a kind of dread I drew him aside a little way up
the hill behind a rock. I went to my lodgings, returned towards dusk
with a spade, dug his grave in a lonely spot near the bottom of a
waterfall where he would never be disturbed, and there I buried him,
reverently smoothing the turf over him. What a night that was for me!
I was haunted incessantly by the vivid image of the dead body and by the
terror which accompanies a great crime. I had repaid all his devotion
with horrible cruelty. I had repented, but he would never know it. It
was not the dog only which I had slain; I had slain Divine faithfulness
and love. That GOD DAMN YOU sounded perpetually in my ears. The
Almighty had registered and executed the curse, but it had fallen upon
the murderer and not on the victim. When I rose in the morning I
distinctly felt the blow of the kick in my foot, and the sensation
lasted all day.
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