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Erie, Pa.,
Friday, Oct. 14, 1938.
Ben drove this morning and out passing the old Horseshoe Works, a little white terrier mongrel dog shot out in front of us. We hit him and it sounded and felt almost like we struck a boulder. I looked out the rear window as Ben was braking, and saw the poor little devil there in the road where we had run over him. His head was down on the pavement and his forelegs crumbled up but it seemed his hind legs were standing. It looked as though the wheels had passed over his neck and shoulders. He seemed to make a supreme dying effort to raise himself, and then with a shudder, his whole body just settled down in a broken heap. The attendant in the gas station there walked out, picked the dog up by the ear and walked away with him toward the vacant lots behind the old shop. It was his dog. Ben went back but the fellow wouldn't talk - only said Ben couldn't help it, to forget it. The thing shook us all and I shan't soon forget the picture of the little dog's body settling down on the road in death after that last instinctive effort to keep life, to get away. And the terrible thought is that children are run over the same way and die the same way - a terrific thought that one might run over a child that way or one's own child might be struck! I was half sick for an hour thinking about these things - thinking of Rog and Bab going to and from school today! It would have been easy to worry in a superstitious way about it - I have to argue with myself occasionally not to be superstitious - this an evil portent, etc. I know if anything were to happen to Bab or Rog, this would have nothing to do with it - a coincidence purely. But such thoughts are shaking. 

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