p. 233 | AN ILLUSTRATION by Editor

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · April 8, 1880

FromThe Review and Herald, Vol. 55, No. 15

AN ILLUSTRATION.

By Editor

Some one has of late been trying to gratify a little petty and ill-disguised spite against the REVIEW and its managers, by sending to various papers in Michigan an article based on falsehood and filled with malice, intended to place our paper in an unfavorable light and injure its influence and its work. It is pitiful to see papers, through heedlessness, if nothing worse, made the tools of designing men; and we are very sure if they knew the utterly groundless and unjust nature of the work which they are thus set about, and how little it disturbs the object of attack, they would not waste any space or printer’s ink in that direction.

The situation is so well set forth in a story told by “Bob Burdette” about a little dog he found barking up a tree in the woods, that we give the story in preference to anything we might say on the subject:—

“The tree was about two hundred feet high. The dog would probably stand about thirteen inches from the floor. He tried to climb that tree. He barked as though his throat was all the rams’ horns of Jericho. He was after that squirrel, which was just as far out of his reach as the clouds. And the squirrel wasn’t paying any attention to the dog, and, indeed, didn’t know what he was barking at. I am not positive that it had not gone off into another tree an hour ago, and was away off in another part of the woods, down near the county line. So I patted the dog’s head as I came away, and said to him,—

“Carlo, keep it up. It seems to do you a heap of good, and it doesn’t bother the squirrel a particle. So keep it up; you can never climb the tree; you will never catch the squirrel; when he wants to come down, he will come down another way, and you will not see him. He will live just as long, and be just as happy with your noise as without it. It occupies your mind, and it doesn’t distract his; and it shows a very human trait in you, Carlo. I have known men just like you, men who spend their lives doing just what you are doing—barking at people who were out of their reach. Keep it up, Carlo, good dog.”