And they did pour these blessed truths into their ears, with great success; for many of the dogs at the recital thereof went into fits; many went insane, and most of the rest terrifiedly burrowed deeply in the earth in their desire to prostrate themselves still lower.
But, as had been prophesied, the up-looking dogs only laughed the more at the great Almighty Fiction, and the poor fools who bowed down to it; and they even barked out blasphemous words of contempt of the new woes and the lurid-minded inventors thereof.
Whereupon the lurid-minded barkers, at the request of the fleas, did call in more effectual help for the protection of the Almighty; for they called in the police dogs, and gave them the Blue Thunderbolts which the other barkers had invented, and ordered them to launch them at the contumelious dogs. Which the police dogs did. And many of those contumelious dogs got it heavily in the neck, and fell over dead or sore wounded; which caused the rest of them to laugh on the other side of their mouths; for they found that although the Almighty Vengeance might be a fiction, the Blue Thunderbolts were terrible facts.
And the Blue Thunderbolt launchers got to like the sport of keeling over contumelious dogs; for it gratified their brutal instincts which would otherwise have been wasted in torturing and killing other creatures, and at the same time gave them a great reputation for piety, and zeal for God; all which was very gratifying; for they found it exceedingly cheap and easy to be pious along the line of their strongest brutal impulses. And the salaried barkers liked it too; for it released them from the hard labor of persuading the dogs to bow down to the profitable Almighty Fiction.
But the lust of keeling over contumelious dogs grew so strong that it outran the supply of dogs to be keeled over; and it often happened that the dogs, being all prostrate and in fear, the police dogs, armed with Blue Thunderbolts, found no one to launch them against; which they looked upon as a most grievous grievance; and they thereupon reproached the barkers with giving them too little to do. So the gloomy barkers, thinking that a little extra terror might be a little extra protection to the Almighty, besides keeping the police dogs in a cheerful frame of mind, went about amongst the prostrate dogs, and arbitrarily picked out many whom they charged with thinking blasphemy and ridicule of the Almighty Fiction, and by force stood them up for the launchers of Blue Thunderbolts to knock over.
But as time went on there came from over the pond many new dogs to Canisville who did not know anything about the Almighty Fiction or Blue Thunderbolts, and they circulated amongst the prostrate dogs and hustled and jostled them and laughed at them, so that the former bold dogs, feeling encouraged, got up and laughed too; and many of the others got ashamed of their prostration, and took a little heart, and ventured to look up, and little by little, leg by leg, they got up and walked, and laughed surprisedly at seeing nothing to fear but Blue Thunderbolts; and the lazy barkers found it too much trouble to get them to lie down again; and the police dogs, being brutal and cowardly, slunk away ashamed and dropped their Blue Thunderbolts in dark holes and swamps where they rotted and rusted.
And that was how the great Almighty Fiction lost his almighty grip on the dogs and went under a cloud.
