It Was the Dog That Died

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 353, 29 March 1946, Page 12

It Was the Dog That Died

RECENT Doctor Mac session has a dog as the hero-always a safe draw. In this case it was a lovely collie with a strange madness that led him sometimes to bite innocent children. His first victim was his master’s little girl, and it needed a good deal of the doctor’s time and inimitable soothing to pacify the mother who feared hydrophobia. Later the dog bit. another child and then, while his fate hung in the balance, redeemed his reputation in a spectacular though unoriginal fashion: he gave the alarm when his master’s house caught fire, assisted Doctor Mac at a last-minute rescue of the children and perished honourably himself in the holocaust. And where were the parents of the rescued children? Where was the woman

who had been so hysterically fearful a few days before about her little daughter’s slight ankle wound? Out at the pictures, with the door locked on the sleeping, unguarded children. Doctors see life. Nothing shocks them, not even the most irrational manifestations of mother-love, and Doctor Mac does: not appear to ask himself whether it is the woman or the dog that is mad, Even his wife draws only the mildest and least

censorious moral from the affair when she sums up in her placid voice, "Well, Robert, I think perhaps Mrs. Hopkins will think twice before she goes to the pictures again and leaves the children alone." :