Placing this inside my india-rubber tobacco-pouch, I bound it tightly, with a strip from my pocket-handkerchief, to Dane's collar; and then, taking the little fellow gently in my arms, and speaking a word or two of dog-talk to him, I dropped him from the grating into the stream below, which was running out fast enough to prevent him from trying to return; nor was it long before I had the satisfaction of seeing him swimming boldly out toward the river, as if he knew perfectly well what he was about. I had no fears but that somebody in a boat would pick him up before he was exhausted, because this kind of dog can live for a great while in the water. Yet he was gone for a long, long time,—at least, it seemed a long time to me,—and I saw the distant boats passing and repassing, and the steamers and the ships, and heard the cheery voices of the mariners, as I held on there by the iron grating, half-dead. At last a boat, pulled by two men and steered by a third, shot up into the channel; and the boatmen raised a joyful shout as I waved my handkerchief to them from my prison-bars. The steersman held my little dog upon his knee; but the faithful animal broke away from him when he saw me, and would have jumped overboard in his eagerness to reach me had he not been caught by one of the men.
When the boat had come quite close under the grating, I saw that it was manned by men of the river guard. They told me that one of their number had gone round to report the matter to the proper authorities, and that assistance would quickly be at hand, and one of them, standing on the thwarts of the boat, reached up to me a flask of brandy and a biscuit, after having partaken of which I felt sufficiently revived to be very thankful for my escape from a horrible death. In less than an hour keys were brought by an officer connected with the sewers, and I was released from my disagreeable position, much to the joy of Dane, who covered me with caresses after his honest doggy fashion; nor, half-starved as the little animal must have been, would he touch a morsel of biscuit until after he had seen me safe in the boat.
The next thing to be done was to make a search for Simonet, who had not made his appearance in the upper regions since we entered the sewers. Men were sent after him, and he was found in a half-stupefied condition just where I had left him, among the dead rats. He could give little or no account of himself, save that his torch had gone out, just as he was about starting in search of me, and that a stupor came over him, then, and he sat down and fell asleep. This was all accounted for afterwards. Having lost his pipe, as I have said, he sought to assuage his craving for stimulants by chewing—or rather eating—quantities of the tobacco with which I had furnished him, and this proved, on examination, to have been taken by me, in mistake, from a jar in which opium had been copiously mixed with the milder narcotic for experimental purposes. Probably the little I had smoked of it in my pipe had somewhat affected me; and Simonet averred that he thought it must have been the smell of it that saved us from being eaten by the rats. A few franc pieces, a new pipe, and a reasonable stock of the best tobacco, made a happy man of that rare old gutter-snipe; but nothing could induce him to make any further reference to the white rat, at the very mention of which he would scowl horribly, and retire, as it were, behind the mass of red hair with which his face was fringed.
As for me, I believe more in horseshoes than ever, since the adventure narrated above. I had a small one made in silver, for Dane; and this the faithful animal wore suspended from his collar as a charm until he went the way of all dogs, full of honors and of years.
TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE:
Obvious printer errors have been corrected. Otherwise, the author's original spelling, punctuation and hyphenation have been left intact.