So the fleas went on making themselves comfortable and did not form any Board of Health.
The dogs, however, got no better, and still went about staring at vacancy.
One day a dog that had flopped down in the gutter to sigh and scratch his head, and look up to heaven, seeing another dog looking up into heaven said unto him: “Why gazest thou so earnestly up into heaven?”
And the other dog said: “And why gazest thou so earnestly up into heaven?”
And the first dog replied: “Because I am convinced that it comes from above.”
And the second dog, encouraged, said: “That also is my conviction. I am sure we work hard enough to make a living, yet the harder we work the harder it is to make a living.”
“It is a mystery,” said the first dog.
“It is, indeed,” replied the second dog, “a great and deep mystery. It must be that Heaven is angry with us for our sins, and that this our everlasting hunger and defeat of the object of all our life-long scratching for food is Heaven’s chastisement, which, as the good missionaries and Tee de Little Wit Blatherskite have so often told us, though for the present it seemeth grievous, will at last work out for us a far more exceeding plenty in the grubful Canaan up there.”
Which far-away heavenly prospect made them both sigh tremendously, and bring their gaze back again to earth, where they saw, not many yards away, another dog looking up into heaven. He gazed thitherward for a long time, and sadly sighing, was about to resume his normal insanity and rush off, when he gave a terrible yelp, which was caused by an unusually venomous nip, by an unusually large and powerful flea, right in the region of the root of his tail. Turning to pay attention to the trouble there, he saw a lot of fleas skipping and scampering about, and having a most hilarious time, and some, he imagined, were laughing at him.
Why he paid especial regard to such a common phenomenon, he did not know and could not have told. Probably it was because he was afflicted with a more than usually bad spell of sanity and mental lucidity, and had what the other dogs called a “Jag” on, during the continuance of which he had visions of things as they really were. Whatever the reason, he stared at them even more fixedly and concentratedly than ever he had gazed up into heaven. His eyes grew big and bulged, and the longer he stared the bigger they grew and the more they bulged. Then slowly there came into them a strange and unaccustomed light, as of a consciousness that was returning after a prolonged absence from home. After a time he winked an eye and then rubbed both very hard with his paws, and ejaculated: “Blamed if I don’t think I have been looking in the wrong direction. I don’t think it comes from above, after all. I do believe it’s fleas.” And he wagged his head sapiently and looked at the fleas again, and wagged his head once more, which having done several times, as though to confirm himself in the surety that he had really made a great discovery, he trotted away; and the other two observing dogs followed him.