THE MYSTERY OF BLACK AND TAN.“The reader must remember that my work is concerning theaspectsof things only.”—Ruskin.THE MYSTERY OF BLACK AND TAN.We,—theSine Quâ Non, the Duchess, the Sputchard, the Dutchard, the Ricapicticapic, Oz and Oz, the Maid of Lorn, and myself,—left Crieff some fifteen years ago, on a bright September morning, soon after daybreak, in a gig. It was a morning still and keen: the sun sending his level shafts across Strathearn, and through the thin mist over its river hollows, to the fierce Aberuchil Hills, and searching out the dark blue shadows in the corries of Benvorlich. But who and how many are “we?” To make you as easy as we all were, let me tell you we were four; and are not these dumb friends of ours persons rather than things? is not their soul ampler, as Plato would say, than their body, and contains rather than is contained? Is not what lives and wills in them, and is affectionate, as spiritual, as immaterial, as truly removed from mere flesh, blood, and bones, as that soul which is the proper self of their master? And when we look each other in the face, as I now look in Dick’s, who is lying in his “corny” by the fireside, and he in mine, is it not as much the dog within looking from out his eyes—the windows of his soul—as it is the man from his?TheSine Quâ Non, who will not be pleased at beingspoken of, is such an one as that vain-glorious and chivalrous Ulric von Hütten—the Reformation’s man of wit, and of the world, and of the sword, who slew Monkery with the wild laughter of hisEpistolæ Obscurorum Virorum—had in his mind when he wrote thus to his friend Fredericus Piscator (Mr. Fred. Fisher), on the 19th May 1519, “Da mihi uxorem, Friderice, et ut scias qualem, venustam, adolescentulam, probe educatam, hilarem, verecundam, patientem.” “Qualem,” he lets Frederic understand in the sentence preceding, is one “quâ cum ludam, quâ jocos conferam, amœniores et leviusculas fabulas misceam, ubi sollicitudinis aciem obtundam, curarum æstus mitigem.” And if you would know more of theSine Quâ Non, and in English, for the world is dead to Latin now, you will find her name and nature in Shakspeare’s words, when King Henry the Eighth says, “go thy ways.”The Duchess, alias all the other names till you come to theMaid of Lorn, is a rough, gnarled, incomparable little bit of a terrier, three parts Dandie-Dinmont, and one part—chiefly in tail and hair—cocker: her father being Lord Rutherfurd’s famous “Dandie,” and her mother the daughter of a Skye, and a light-hearted Cocker. The Duchess is about the size and weight of a rabbit; but has a soul as big, as fierce, and as faithful as had Meg Merrilies, with a nose as black as Topsy’s; and is herself every bit as game and queer as that delicious imp of darkness and of Mrs. Stowe. Her legs set her long slim body about two inches and a half from the ground, making her very like a huge caterpillar or hairyoobit—her two eyes, dark and full, and her shining nose, being all of her that seems anything but hair. Her tail was a sort of stump, in size and in look verymuch like a spare foreleg, stuck in anywhere to be near. Her color was black above and a rich brown below, with two dots of tan above the eyes, which dots are among the deepest of the mysteries of Black and Tan.This strange little being I had known for some years, but had only possessed about a month. She and her pup (a young lady calledSmoot, which means smolt, a young salmon), were given me by the widow of an honest and drunken—as much of the one as of the other—Edinburgh street-porter, a native of Badenoch, as a legacy from him and a fee from her for my attendance on the poor man’s death-bed. But my first sight of the Duchess was years before in Broughton Street, when I saw her sitting bolt upright, begging, imploring, with those little rough four leggies, and those yearning, beautiful eyes, all the world, or any one, to help her master, who was lying “mortal” in the kennel. I raised him, and with the help of a ragged Samaritan, who was only less drunk than he, I got Macpherson—he held from Glen Truim—home; the excited doggie trotting off, and looking back eagerly to show us the way. I never again passed the Porters’ Stand without speaking to her. After Malcolm’s burial I took possession of her; she escaped to the wretched house, but as her mistress was off to Kingussie, and the door shut, she gave a pitiful howl or two, and was forthwith back at my door, with an impatient, querulous bark. And so this is our second of the four; and is she not deserving of as many names as any other Duchess, from her of Medina Sidonia downwards?A fierier little soul never dwelt in a queerer or stancher body; see her huddled up, and you would think her a bundle of hair, or a bit of old mossy wood, or aslice of heathery turf, with some red soil underneath but speak to her, or give her a cat to deal with, be it bigger than herself, and what an incarnation of affection, energy, and fury—what a fell unquenchable little ruffian.The Maid of Lornwas a chestnut mare, a broken down racer, thorough-bred as Beeswing, but less fortunate in her life, and I fear not so happyoccasione mortis: unlike the Duchess, her body was greater and finer than her soul; still she was a ladylike creature, sleek, slim, nervous, meek, willing, and fleet. She had been thrown down by some brutal half-drunk Forfarshire laird, when he put her wildly and with her wind gone, at the last hurdle on the North Inch at the Perth races. She was done for and bought for ten pounds by the landlord of the Drummond Arms, Crieff, who had been taking as much money out of her, and putting as little corn into her as was compatible with life, purposing to run her for the Consolation Stakes at Stirling. Poor young lady, she was a sad sight—broken in back, in knees, in character, and wind—in everything but temper, which was as sweet and all-enduring as Penelope’s or our own Enid’s.Of myself, the fourth, I decline making any account. Be it sufficient that I am the Dutchard’s master, and drove the gig.It was, as I said, a keen and bright morning, and the S. Q. N. feeling chilly, and the Duchess being away after a cat up a back entry, doing a chance stroke of business, and the mare looking only half breakfasted, I made them give her a full feed of meal and water, and stood by and enjoyed her enjoyment. It seemed too good to be true, and she looked up every now andthen in the midst of her feast, with a mild wonder. Away she and I bowled down the sleeping village, all overrun with sunshine, the dumb idiot man and the birds alone up, for the ostler was off to his straw. There was the S. Q. N. and her small panting friend, who had lost the cat, but had got what philosophers say is better—the chase. “Nous ne cherchons jamais les choses, mais la recherche des choses,” says Pascal. The Duchess would substitute forles choses—les chats. Pursuit, not possession, was her passion. We all got in, and off set the Maid, who was in excellent heart, quite gay, pricking her ears and casting up her head, and rattling away at a great pace.We baited at St. Fillans, and again cheered the heart of the Maid with unaccustomed corn—the S. Q. N., Duchie, and myself, going up to the beautiful rising ground at the back of the inn, and lying on the fragrant heather looking at the Loch, with its mild gleams and shadows, and its second heaven looking out from its depths, the wild, rough mountains of Glenartney towering opposite. Duchie, I believe, was engaged in minor business close at hand, and caught and ate several large flies and a humble-bee; she was very fond of this small game.There is not in all Scotland, or as far as I have seen in all else, a more exquisite twelve miles of scenery than that between Crieff and the head of Lochearn. Ochtertyre, and its woods; Benchonzie, the head-quarters of the earthquakes, only lower than Benvorlich; Strowan; Lawers, with its grand old Scotch pines; Comrie, with the wild Lednoch; Dunira; and St. Fillans, where we are now lying, and where the poor thoroughbred is tucking in her corn. We start after twohours of dreaming in the half sunlight, and rumble ever and anon over an earthquake, as the common folk call these same hollow, resounding rifts in the rock beneath, and arriving at the old inn at Lochearnhead, have atousietea. In the evening, when the day was darkening into night, Duchie and I,—the S. Q. N. remaining to read and rest,—walked up Glen Ogle. It was then in its primeval state, the new road non-existent, and the old one staggering up and down and across that most original and Cyclopean valley, deep, threatening, savage, and yet beautiful—“Where rocks were rudely heaped, and rentAs by a spirit turbulent;Where sights were rough, and sounds were wild,And everything unreconciled;”with flocks of mighty boulders, straying all over it. Some far up, and frightful to look at, others huddled down in the river,immane pecus, and one huge unloosened fellow, as big as a manse, up aloft watching them, like old Proteus with his calves, as if they had fled from the sea by stress of weather, and had been led by their ancient herdaltos visere montes—a wilder, more “unreconciled” place I know not; and now that the darkness was being poured into it, those big fellows looked bigger, and hardly “canny.”Just as we were turning to come home—Duchie unwillingly, as she had much multifarious, and as usual fruitless hunting to do—she and I were startled by seeing a doginthe side of the hill, where the soil had been broken. She barked and I stared; she trotted consequentially up and snuffedmore canino, and I went nearer: it never moved, and on coming quite close I saw as it were theimageof a terrier, a something thatmade me think of an idea unrealized; the rough, short, scrubby heather and dead grass, made a color and a coat just like those of a good Highland terrier—a sort of pepper and salt this one was—and below, the broken soil, in which there was some iron and clay, with old gnarled roots, for all the world like its odd, bandy, and sturdy legs. Duchie seemed not so easily unbeguiled as I was, and kept staring, and snuffing, and growling, but did not touch it,—seemed afraid. I left and looked again, and certainly it was very odd thegrowingresemblance to one of the indigenous, hairy, low-legged dogs, one sees all about the Highlands, terriers, or earthy ones.We came home, and told the S. Q. N. our joke. I dreamt of that visionary terrier, that son of the soil, all night; and in the very early morning, leaving the S. Q. N. asleep, I walked up with the Duchess to the same spot. What a morning! it was before sunrise, at least before he had got above Benvorlich. The loch was lying in a faint mist, beautiful exceedingly, as if half veiled and asleep, the cataract of Edinample roaring less loudly than in the night, and the old castle of the Lords of Lochow, in the shadow of the hills, among its trees, might be seen“Sole sitting by the shore of old romance.”There was still gloom in Glen Ogle, though the beams of the morning were shooting up into the broad fields of the sky. I was looking back and down, when I heard the Duchess bark sharply, and then give a cry of fear, and on turning round, there was she with as much as she had of tail between her legs, where I never saw it before, and her small Grace, without noticing meor my cries, making down to the inn and her mistress, a hairy hurricane. I walked on to see what it was, and there in the same spot as last night, in the bank, was a real dog—no mistake; it was not, as the day before, a mere surface orspectrum, or ghost of a dog; it was plainly round and substantial; it was much developed since eightP.M.As I looked, it moved slightly, and as it were by a sort of shiver, as if an electric shock (and why not?) was being administered by a law of nature; it had then no tail, or rather had an odd amorphous look in that region; its eye, for it had one—it was seen in profile—looked to my profane vision like (why not actually?) a huge blaeberry (vaccinium Myrtillus, it is well to be scientific) black and full; and I thought,—but dare not be sure, and had no time or courage to be minute,—that where the nose should be, there was a small shining black snail, probably theLimax nigerof M. de Férussac, curled up, and if you look at any dog’s nose you will be struck with the typical resemblance, in the corrugations and moistness and jetty blackness of the one to the other, and of the other to the one. He was a strongly-built, wiry, bandy, and short-legged dog. As I was staring upon him, a beam—Oh, first creative beam!—sent from the sun—“Like as an arrow from a bow,Shot by an archer strong”—as he looked over Benvorlich’s shoulder, and piercing a cloudlet of mist which clung close to him, and filling it with whitest radiance, struck upon that eye or berry, and lit up that nose or snail: in an instant he sneezed (thenisus (sneezus?) formativusof the ancients); that eye quivered and was quickened, and with a shudder—suchas a horse executes with that curious muscle of the skin, of which we have a mere fragment in our neck, thePlatysma Myoides, and which doubtless has been lessened as we lost our distance from the horse-type—which dislodged some dirt and stones and dead heather, and doubtless endless beetles, and, it may be, made some near weasel open his other eye, up went his tail, and out he came, lively, entire, consummate,warm, wagging his tail, I was going to say like a Christian, I mean like an ordinary dog. Then flashed upon me the solution of theMystery of Black and Tanin all its varieties: the body, its upper part gray or black or yellow according to the upper soil and herbs, heather, bent, moss, &c.; the belly and feet, red or tan or light fawn, according to the nature of the deep soil, be it ochrey, ferruginous, light clay, or comminuted mica slate. And wonderfullest of all, theDotsofTanabove the eyes—and who has not noticed and wondered as to the philosophy of them?—I saw madeby the two fore feet, wet and clayey, being put briskly up to his eyes as he sneezed that genetic, vivifying sneeze, and leaving their mark, forever.He took to me quite pleasantly, by virtue of “natural selection,” and has accompanied me thus far in our “struggle for life,” and he, and the S. Q. N., and the Duchess, and the Maid, returned that day to Crieff, and were friends all our days. I was a little timid when he was crossing a burn lest he should wash away his feet, but he merely colored the water, and every day less and less, till in a fortnight I could wash him without fear of his becoming asolution, or fluid extract of dog, and thus resolving the mystery back into itself.The mare’s days were short. She won the Consolation Stakes at Stirling, and was found dead next morningin Gibb’s stables. The Duchess died in a good old age, as may be seen in the history of “Our Dogs.” The S. Q. N., and the parthenogenesic earth-born, theCespes Vivus—whom we sometimes called Joshua, because he was the Son of None (Nun), and even Melchisedec has been whispered, but only that, and Fitz-Memnon, as being as it were a son of the Sun, sometimes the Autochthonαὐτόχθονος; (indeed, if the relation of thecoup de soleiland the blaeberry had not been plainly causal and effectual, I might have called himFilius Gunni, for at the very moment of that shudder, by which he leapt out of non-life into life, the Marquis’s gamekeeper fired his rifle up the hill, and brought down a stray young stag,) these two are happily with me still, and at this moment she is out on the grass in a low easy-chair, reading Emilie Carlen’sBrilliant Marriage, and Dick is lying at her feet, watching, with cocked ears, some noise in the ripe wheat, possibly a chicken, for, poor fellow, he has a weakness for worrying hens, and such small deer, when there is a dearth of greater. If any, as is not unreasonable, doubt me and my story, they may come and see Dick. I assure them he is well worth seeing.
“The reader must remember that my work is concerning theaspectsof things only.”—Ruskin.
THE MYSTERY OF BLACK AND TAN.
We,—theSine Quâ Non, the Duchess, the Sputchard, the Dutchard, the Ricapicticapic, Oz and Oz, the Maid of Lorn, and myself,—left Crieff some fifteen years ago, on a bright September morning, soon after daybreak, in a gig. It was a morning still and keen: the sun sending his level shafts across Strathearn, and through the thin mist over its river hollows, to the fierce Aberuchil Hills, and searching out the dark blue shadows in the corries of Benvorlich. But who and how many are “we?” To make you as easy as we all were, let me tell you we were four; and are not these dumb friends of ours persons rather than things? is not their soul ampler, as Plato would say, than their body, and contains rather than is contained? Is not what lives and wills in them, and is affectionate, as spiritual, as immaterial, as truly removed from mere flesh, blood, and bones, as that soul which is the proper self of their master? And when we look each other in the face, as I now look in Dick’s, who is lying in his “corny” by the fireside, and he in mine, is it not as much the dog within looking from out his eyes—the windows of his soul—as it is the man from his?
TheSine Quâ Non, who will not be pleased at beingspoken of, is such an one as that vain-glorious and chivalrous Ulric von Hütten—the Reformation’s man of wit, and of the world, and of the sword, who slew Monkery with the wild laughter of hisEpistolæ Obscurorum Virorum—had in his mind when he wrote thus to his friend Fredericus Piscator (Mr. Fred. Fisher), on the 19th May 1519, “Da mihi uxorem, Friderice, et ut scias qualem, venustam, adolescentulam, probe educatam, hilarem, verecundam, patientem.” “Qualem,” he lets Frederic understand in the sentence preceding, is one “quâ cum ludam, quâ jocos conferam, amœniores et leviusculas fabulas misceam, ubi sollicitudinis aciem obtundam, curarum æstus mitigem.” And if you would know more of theSine Quâ Non, and in English, for the world is dead to Latin now, you will find her name and nature in Shakspeare’s words, when King Henry the Eighth says, “go thy ways.”
The Duchess, alias all the other names till you come to theMaid of Lorn, is a rough, gnarled, incomparable little bit of a terrier, three parts Dandie-Dinmont, and one part—chiefly in tail and hair—cocker: her father being Lord Rutherfurd’s famous “Dandie,” and her mother the daughter of a Skye, and a light-hearted Cocker. The Duchess is about the size and weight of a rabbit; but has a soul as big, as fierce, and as faithful as had Meg Merrilies, with a nose as black as Topsy’s; and is herself every bit as game and queer as that delicious imp of darkness and of Mrs. Stowe. Her legs set her long slim body about two inches and a half from the ground, making her very like a huge caterpillar or hairyoobit—her two eyes, dark and full, and her shining nose, being all of her that seems anything but hair. Her tail was a sort of stump, in size and in look verymuch like a spare foreleg, stuck in anywhere to be near. Her color was black above and a rich brown below, with two dots of tan above the eyes, which dots are among the deepest of the mysteries of Black and Tan.
This strange little being I had known for some years, but had only possessed about a month. She and her pup (a young lady calledSmoot, which means smolt, a young salmon), were given me by the widow of an honest and drunken—as much of the one as of the other—Edinburgh street-porter, a native of Badenoch, as a legacy from him and a fee from her for my attendance on the poor man’s death-bed. But my first sight of the Duchess was years before in Broughton Street, when I saw her sitting bolt upright, begging, imploring, with those little rough four leggies, and those yearning, beautiful eyes, all the world, or any one, to help her master, who was lying “mortal” in the kennel. I raised him, and with the help of a ragged Samaritan, who was only less drunk than he, I got Macpherson—he held from Glen Truim—home; the excited doggie trotting off, and looking back eagerly to show us the way. I never again passed the Porters’ Stand without speaking to her. After Malcolm’s burial I took possession of her; she escaped to the wretched house, but as her mistress was off to Kingussie, and the door shut, she gave a pitiful howl or two, and was forthwith back at my door, with an impatient, querulous bark. And so this is our second of the four; and is she not deserving of as many names as any other Duchess, from her of Medina Sidonia downwards?
A fierier little soul never dwelt in a queerer or stancher body; see her huddled up, and you would think her a bundle of hair, or a bit of old mossy wood, or aslice of heathery turf, with some red soil underneath but speak to her, or give her a cat to deal with, be it bigger than herself, and what an incarnation of affection, energy, and fury—what a fell unquenchable little ruffian.
The Maid of Lornwas a chestnut mare, a broken down racer, thorough-bred as Beeswing, but less fortunate in her life, and I fear not so happyoccasione mortis: unlike the Duchess, her body was greater and finer than her soul; still she was a ladylike creature, sleek, slim, nervous, meek, willing, and fleet. She had been thrown down by some brutal half-drunk Forfarshire laird, when he put her wildly and with her wind gone, at the last hurdle on the North Inch at the Perth races. She was done for and bought for ten pounds by the landlord of the Drummond Arms, Crieff, who had been taking as much money out of her, and putting as little corn into her as was compatible with life, purposing to run her for the Consolation Stakes at Stirling. Poor young lady, she was a sad sight—broken in back, in knees, in character, and wind—in everything but temper, which was as sweet and all-enduring as Penelope’s or our own Enid’s.
Of myself, the fourth, I decline making any account. Be it sufficient that I am the Dutchard’s master, and drove the gig.
It was, as I said, a keen and bright morning, and the S. Q. N. feeling chilly, and the Duchess being away after a cat up a back entry, doing a chance stroke of business, and the mare looking only half breakfasted, I made them give her a full feed of meal and water, and stood by and enjoyed her enjoyment. It seemed too good to be true, and she looked up every now andthen in the midst of her feast, with a mild wonder. Away she and I bowled down the sleeping village, all overrun with sunshine, the dumb idiot man and the birds alone up, for the ostler was off to his straw. There was the S. Q. N. and her small panting friend, who had lost the cat, but had got what philosophers say is better—the chase. “Nous ne cherchons jamais les choses, mais la recherche des choses,” says Pascal. The Duchess would substitute forles choses—les chats. Pursuit, not possession, was her passion. We all got in, and off set the Maid, who was in excellent heart, quite gay, pricking her ears and casting up her head, and rattling away at a great pace.
We baited at St. Fillans, and again cheered the heart of the Maid with unaccustomed corn—the S. Q. N., Duchie, and myself, going up to the beautiful rising ground at the back of the inn, and lying on the fragrant heather looking at the Loch, with its mild gleams and shadows, and its second heaven looking out from its depths, the wild, rough mountains of Glenartney towering opposite. Duchie, I believe, was engaged in minor business close at hand, and caught and ate several large flies and a humble-bee; she was very fond of this small game.
There is not in all Scotland, or as far as I have seen in all else, a more exquisite twelve miles of scenery than that between Crieff and the head of Lochearn. Ochtertyre, and its woods; Benchonzie, the head-quarters of the earthquakes, only lower than Benvorlich; Strowan; Lawers, with its grand old Scotch pines; Comrie, with the wild Lednoch; Dunira; and St. Fillans, where we are now lying, and where the poor thoroughbred is tucking in her corn. We start after twohours of dreaming in the half sunlight, and rumble ever and anon over an earthquake, as the common folk call these same hollow, resounding rifts in the rock beneath, and arriving at the old inn at Lochearnhead, have atousietea. In the evening, when the day was darkening into night, Duchie and I,—the S. Q. N. remaining to read and rest,—walked up Glen Ogle. It was then in its primeval state, the new road non-existent, and the old one staggering up and down and across that most original and Cyclopean valley, deep, threatening, savage, and yet beautiful—
“Where rocks were rudely heaped, and rentAs by a spirit turbulent;Where sights were rough, and sounds were wild,And everything unreconciled;”
“Where rocks were rudely heaped, and rent
As by a spirit turbulent;
Where sights were rough, and sounds were wild,
And everything unreconciled;”
with flocks of mighty boulders, straying all over it. Some far up, and frightful to look at, others huddled down in the river,immane pecus, and one huge unloosened fellow, as big as a manse, up aloft watching them, like old Proteus with his calves, as if they had fled from the sea by stress of weather, and had been led by their ancient herdaltos visere montes—a wilder, more “unreconciled” place I know not; and now that the darkness was being poured into it, those big fellows looked bigger, and hardly “canny.”
Just as we were turning to come home—Duchie unwillingly, as she had much multifarious, and as usual fruitless hunting to do—she and I were startled by seeing a doginthe side of the hill, where the soil had been broken. She barked and I stared; she trotted consequentially up and snuffedmore canino, and I went nearer: it never moved, and on coming quite close I saw as it were theimageof a terrier, a something thatmade me think of an idea unrealized; the rough, short, scrubby heather and dead grass, made a color and a coat just like those of a good Highland terrier—a sort of pepper and salt this one was—and below, the broken soil, in which there was some iron and clay, with old gnarled roots, for all the world like its odd, bandy, and sturdy legs. Duchie seemed not so easily unbeguiled as I was, and kept staring, and snuffing, and growling, but did not touch it,—seemed afraid. I left and looked again, and certainly it was very odd thegrowingresemblance to one of the indigenous, hairy, low-legged dogs, one sees all about the Highlands, terriers, or earthy ones.
We came home, and told the S. Q. N. our joke. I dreamt of that visionary terrier, that son of the soil, all night; and in the very early morning, leaving the S. Q. N. asleep, I walked up with the Duchess to the same spot. What a morning! it was before sunrise, at least before he had got above Benvorlich. The loch was lying in a faint mist, beautiful exceedingly, as if half veiled and asleep, the cataract of Edinample roaring less loudly than in the night, and the old castle of the Lords of Lochow, in the shadow of the hills, among its trees, might be seen
“Sole sitting by the shore of old romance.”
“Sole sitting by the shore of old romance.”
There was still gloom in Glen Ogle, though the beams of the morning were shooting up into the broad fields of the sky. I was looking back and down, when I heard the Duchess bark sharply, and then give a cry of fear, and on turning round, there was she with as much as she had of tail between her legs, where I never saw it before, and her small Grace, without noticing meor my cries, making down to the inn and her mistress, a hairy hurricane. I walked on to see what it was, and there in the same spot as last night, in the bank, was a real dog—no mistake; it was not, as the day before, a mere surface orspectrum, or ghost of a dog; it was plainly round and substantial; it was much developed since eightP.M.As I looked, it moved slightly, and as it were by a sort of shiver, as if an electric shock (and why not?) was being administered by a law of nature; it had then no tail, or rather had an odd amorphous look in that region; its eye, for it had one—it was seen in profile—looked to my profane vision like (why not actually?) a huge blaeberry (vaccinium Myrtillus, it is well to be scientific) black and full; and I thought,—but dare not be sure, and had no time or courage to be minute,—that where the nose should be, there was a small shining black snail, probably theLimax nigerof M. de Férussac, curled up, and if you look at any dog’s nose you will be struck with the typical resemblance, in the corrugations and moistness and jetty blackness of the one to the other, and of the other to the one. He was a strongly-built, wiry, bandy, and short-legged dog. As I was staring upon him, a beam—Oh, first creative beam!—sent from the sun—
“Like as an arrow from a bow,Shot by an archer strong”—
“Like as an arrow from a bow,
Shot by an archer strong”—
as he looked over Benvorlich’s shoulder, and piercing a cloudlet of mist which clung close to him, and filling it with whitest radiance, struck upon that eye or berry, and lit up that nose or snail: in an instant he sneezed (thenisus (sneezus?) formativusof the ancients); that eye quivered and was quickened, and with a shudder—suchas a horse executes with that curious muscle of the skin, of which we have a mere fragment in our neck, thePlatysma Myoides, and which doubtless has been lessened as we lost our distance from the horse-type—which dislodged some dirt and stones and dead heather, and doubtless endless beetles, and, it may be, made some near weasel open his other eye, up went his tail, and out he came, lively, entire, consummate,warm, wagging his tail, I was going to say like a Christian, I mean like an ordinary dog. Then flashed upon me the solution of theMystery of Black and Tanin all its varieties: the body, its upper part gray or black or yellow according to the upper soil and herbs, heather, bent, moss, &c.; the belly and feet, red or tan or light fawn, according to the nature of the deep soil, be it ochrey, ferruginous, light clay, or comminuted mica slate. And wonderfullest of all, theDotsofTanabove the eyes—and who has not noticed and wondered as to the philosophy of them?—I saw madeby the two fore feet, wet and clayey, being put briskly up to his eyes as he sneezed that genetic, vivifying sneeze, and leaving their mark, forever.
He took to me quite pleasantly, by virtue of “natural selection,” and has accompanied me thus far in our “struggle for life,” and he, and the S. Q. N., and the Duchess, and the Maid, returned that day to Crieff, and were friends all our days. I was a little timid when he was crossing a burn lest he should wash away his feet, but he merely colored the water, and every day less and less, till in a fortnight I could wash him without fear of his becoming asolution, or fluid extract of dog, and thus resolving the mystery back into itself.
The mare’s days were short. She won the Consolation Stakes at Stirling, and was found dead next morningin Gibb’s stables. The Duchess died in a good old age, as may be seen in the history of “Our Dogs.” The S. Q. N., and the parthenogenesic earth-born, theCespes Vivus—whom we sometimes called Joshua, because he was the Son of None (Nun), and even Melchisedec has been whispered, but only that, and Fitz-Memnon, as being as it were a son of the Sun, sometimes the Autochthonαὐτόχθονος; (indeed, if the relation of thecoup de soleiland the blaeberry had not been plainly causal and effectual, I might have called himFilius Gunni, for at the very moment of that shudder, by which he leapt out of non-life into life, the Marquis’s gamekeeper fired his rifle up the hill, and brought down a stray young stag,) these two are happily with me still, and at this moment she is out on the grass in a low easy-chair, reading Emilie Carlen’sBrilliant Marriage, and Dick is lying at her feet, watching, with cocked ears, some noise in the ripe wheat, possibly a chicken, for, poor fellow, he has a weakness for worrying hens, and such small deer, when there is a dearth of greater. If any, as is not unreasonable, doubt me and my story, they may come and see Dick. I assure them he is well worth seeing.
HER LAST HALF-CROWN.Once I had friends—though now by all forsaken;Once I had parents—they are now in heaven.I had a home once——Worn out with anguish, sin, and cold, and hunger,Down sunk the outcast, death had seized her senses.There did the stranger find her in the morning—God had released her.Southey.HER LAST HALF-CROWN.Hugh Miller, the geologist, journalist, and man of genius, was sitting in his newspaper office late one dreary winter night. The clerks had all left and he was preparing to go, when a quick rap came to the door. He said “Come in,” and, looking towards the entrance, saw a little ragged child all wet with sleet. “Are ye Hugh Miller?” “Yes.” “Mary Duff wants ye.” “What does she want?” “She’s deein.” Some misty recollection of the name made him at once set out, and with his well-known plaid and stick, he was soon striding after the child, who trotted through the now deserted High Street, into the Canongate. By the time he got to the Old Playhouse Close, Hugh had revived his memory of Mary Duff: a lively girl who had been bred up beside him in Cromarty. The last time he had seen her was at a brother mason’s marriage, where Mary was “best maid,” and he “best man.” He seemed still to see her bright young careless face, her tidy short gown, and her dark eyes, and to hear her bantering, merry tongue.Down the close went the ragged little woman, and up an outside stair, Hugh keeping near her with difficulty; in the passage she held out her hand and touched him;taking it in his great palm, he felt that she wanted a thumb. Finding her way like a cat through the darkness, she opened a door, and saying “That’s her!” vanished. By the light of a dying fire he saw lying in the corner of the large empty room something like a woman’s clothes, and on drawing nearer became aware of a thin pale face and two dark eyes looking keenly but helplessly up at him. The eyes were plainly Mary Duff’s, though he could recognize no other feature. She wept silently, gazing steadily at him. “Are you Mary Duff?” “It’s a’ that’s o’ me, Hugh.” She then tried to speak to him, something plainly of great urgency, but she couldn’t, and seeing that she was very ill, and was making herself worse, he put half-a-crown into her feverish hand, and said he would call again in the morning. He could get no information about her from the neighbors; they were surly or asleep.When he returned next morning, the little girl met him at the stair-head, and said, “She’s deid.” He went in, and found that it was true; there she lay, the fire out, her face placid, and the likeness to her maiden self restored. Hugh thought he would have known her now, even with those bright black eyes closed as they were,in æternum.Seeking out a neighbor, he said he would like to bury Mary Duff, and arranged for the funeral with an undertaker in the close. Little seemed to be known of the poor outcast, except that she was a “licht,” or, as Solomon would have said, a “strange woman.” “Did she drink?” “Whiles.”On the day of the funeral one or two residents in the close accompanied him to the Canongate Churchyard. He observed a decent looking little old woman watchingthem, and following at a distance, though the day was wet and bitter. After the grave was filled, and he had taken off his hat, as the men finished their business by putting on and slapping the sod, he saw this old woman remaining. She came up and, courtesying, said, “Ye wad ken that lass, sir?” “Yes; I knew her when she was young.” The woman then burst into tears, and told Hugh that she “keepit a bit shop at the Closemooth, and Mary dealt wi’ me, and aye paid reglar, and I was feared she was dead, for she had been a month awin’ me half-a-crown:” and then with a look and voice of awe, she told him how on the night he was sent for, and immediately after he had left, she had been awakened by some one in her room; and by her bright fire—for she was abein, well-to-do body—she had seen the wasted dying creature, who came forward and said, “Wasn’t it half-a-crown?” “Yes.” “There it is,” and putting it under the bolster, vanished!Alas for Mary Duff! her career had been a sad one since the day when she had stood side by side with Hugh at the wedding of their friends. Her father died not long after, and her mother supplanted her in the affections of the man to whom she had given her heart. The shock was overwhelming, and made home intolerable. Mary fled from it blighted and embittered, and after a life of shame and sorrow, crept into the corner of her wretched garret, to die deserted and alone; giving evidence in her latest act that honesty had survived amid the wreck of nearly every other virtue.“My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.”
Once I had friends—though now by all forsaken;Once I had parents—they are now in heaven.I had a home once——Worn out with anguish, sin, and cold, and hunger,Down sunk the outcast, death had seized her senses.There did the stranger find her in the morning—God had released her.Southey.
Once I had friends—though now by all forsaken;Once I had parents—they are now in heaven.I had a home once——
Once I had friends—though now by all forsaken;
Once I had parents—they are now in heaven.
I had a home once——
Worn out with anguish, sin, and cold, and hunger,Down sunk the outcast, death had seized her senses.There did the stranger find her in the morning—God had released her.
Worn out with anguish, sin, and cold, and hunger,
Down sunk the outcast, death had seized her senses.
There did the stranger find her in the morning—
God had released her.
Southey.
HER LAST HALF-CROWN.
Hugh Miller, the geologist, journalist, and man of genius, was sitting in his newspaper office late one dreary winter night. The clerks had all left and he was preparing to go, when a quick rap came to the door. He said “Come in,” and, looking towards the entrance, saw a little ragged child all wet with sleet. “Are ye Hugh Miller?” “Yes.” “Mary Duff wants ye.” “What does she want?” “She’s deein.” Some misty recollection of the name made him at once set out, and with his well-known plaid and stick, he was soon striding after the child, who trotted through the now deserted High Street, into the Canongate. By the time he got to the Old Playhouse Close, Hugh had revived his memory of Mary Duff: a lively girl who had been bred up beside him in Cromarty. The last time he had seen her was at a brother mason’s marriage, where Mary was “best maid,” and he “best man.” He seemed still to see her bright young careless face, her tidy short gown, and her dark eyes, and to hear her bantering, merry tongue.
Down the close went the ragged little woman, and up an outside stair, Hugh keeping near her with difficulty; in the passage she held out her hand and touched him;taking it in his great palm, he felt that she wanted a thumb. Finding her way like a cat through the darkness, she opened a door, and saying “That’s her!” vanished. By the light of a dying fire he saw lying in the corner of the large empty room something like a woman’s clothes, and on drawing nearer became aware of a thin pale face and two dark eyes looking keenly but helplessly up at him. The eyes were plainly Mary Duff’s, though he could recognize no other feature. She wept silently, gazing steadily at him. “Are you Mary Duff?” “It’s a’ that’s o’ me, Hugh.” She then tried to speak to him, something plainly of great urgency, but she couldn’t, and seeing that she was very ill, and was making herself worse, he put half-a-crown into her feverish hand, and said he would call again in the morning. He could get no information about her from the neighbors; they were surly or asleep.
When he returned next morning, the little girl met him at the stair-head, and said, “She’s deid.” He went in, and found that it was true; there she lay, the fire out, her face placid, and the likeness to her maiden self restored. Hugh thought he would have known her now, even with those bright black eyes closed as they were,in æternum.
Seeking out a neighbor, he said he would like to bury Mary Duff, and arranged for the funeral with an undertaker in the close. Little seemed to be known of the poor outcast, except that she was a “licht,” or, as Solomon would have said, a “strange woman.” “Did she drink?” “Whiles.”
On the day of the funeral one or two residents in the close accompanied him to the Canongate Churchyard. He observed a decent looking little old woman watchingthem, and following at a distance, though the day was wet and bitter. After the grave was filled, and he had taken off his hat, as the men finished their business by putting on and slapping the sod, he saw this old woman remaining. She came up and, courtesying, said, “Ye wad ken that lass, sir?” “Yes; I knew her when she was young.” The woman then burst into tears, and told Hugh that she “keepit a bit shop at the Closemooth, and Mary dealt wi’ me, and aye paid reglar, and I was feared she was dead, for she had been a month awin’ me half-a-crown:” and then with a look and voice of awe, she told him how on the night he was sent for, and immediately after he had left, she had been awakened by some one in her room; and by her bright fire—for she was abein, well-to-do body—she had seen the wasted dying creature, who came forward and said, “Wasn’t it half-a-crown?” “Yes.” “There it is,” and putting it under the bolster, vanished!
Alas for Mary Duff! her career had been a sad one since the day when she had stood side by side with Hugh at the wedding of their friends. Her father died not long after, and her mother supplanted her in the affections of the man to whom she had given her heart. The shock was overwhelming, and made home intolerable. Mary fled from it blighted and embittered, and after a life of shame and sorrow, crept into the corner of her wretched garret, to die deserted and alone; giving evidence in her latest act that honesty had survived amid the wreck of nearly every other virtue.
“My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.”
OUR DOGS.“The misery of keeping a dog, is his dying so soon; but to be sure, if he lived for fifty years, and then died, what would become of me?”—Sir Walter Scott.“There is in every animal’s eye a dim image and gleam of humanity, a flash of strange light through which their life looks out and up to our great mystery of command over them, and claims the fellowship of the creature if not of the soul.”—Ruskin.To Sir Walter and Lady Trevelyan’sglum and faithful“PETER,”with much regard.OUR DOGS.I wasbitten severely by a little dog when with my mother at Moffat Wells, being then three years of age, and I have remained “bitten” ever since in the matter of dogs. I remember that little dog, and can at this moment not only recall my pain and terror—I have no doubt I was to blame—but also her face; and were I allowed to search among the shades in the cynic Elysian fields, I could pick her out still. All my life I have been familiar with these faithful creatures, making friends of them, and speaking to them; and the only time I ever addressed the public, about a year after being bitten, was at the farm of Kirklaw Hill, near Biggar, when the text, given out from an empty cart in which the ploughmen had placed me, was “Jacob’s dog,” and my entire sermon was as follows:—“Some say that Jacob had a black dog (theovery long), and some say that Jacob had a white dog, butI(imagine the presumption of four years!) say Jacob had a brown dog, and a brown dog it shall be.”I had many intimacies from this time onwards—Bawtie, of the inn; Keeper, the carrier’s bull-terrier; Tiger, a huge tawny mastiff from Edinburgh, which I think must have been an uncle of Rab’s; all the sheep dogsat Callands—Spring, Mavis, Yarrow, Swallow, Cheviot, etc.; but it was not till I was at college, and my brother at the High School, that we possessed a dog.TOBYWas the most utterly shabby, vulgar, mean-looking cur I ever beheld: in one word,a tyke. He had not one good feature except his teeth and eyes, and his bark, if that can be called a feature. He was not ugly enough to be interesting; his color black and white, his shape leggy and clumsy; altogether what Sydney Smith would have called an extraordinarily ordinary dog; and, as I have said, not even greatly ugly, or, as the Aberdonians have it,bonnie wi’ ill-fauredness. My brother William found him the centre of attraction to a multitude of small blackguards who were drowning him slowly in Lochend Loch, doing their best to lengthen out the process, and secure the greatest amount of fun with the nearest approach to death. Even then Toby showed his great intellect by pretending to be dead, and thus gaining time and an inspiration. William bought him for twopence, and as he had it not, the boys accompanied him to Pilrig Street, when I happened to meet him, and giving the twopence to the biggest boy, had the satisfaction of seeing a general engagement of much severity, during which the twopence disappeared; one penny going off with a very small and swift boy, and the other vanishing hopelessly into the grating of a drain.Toby was for weeks in the house unbeknown to any one but ourselves two and the cook, and from my grandmother’s love of tidiness and hatred of dogs and of dirt,I believe she would have expelled “him whom we saved from drowning,” had not he, in his straightforward way, walked into my father’s bedroom one night when he was bathing his feet, and introduced himself with a wag of his tail, intimating a general willingness to be happy. My father laughed most heartily, and at last Toby, having got his way to his bare feet, and having begun to lick his soles and between his toes with his small rough tongue, my father gave such an unwonted shout of laughter, that we—grandmother, sisters, and all of us—went in. Grandmother might argue with all her energy and skill, but as surely as the pressure of Tom Jones’ infantile fist upon Mr. Allworthy’s forefinger undid all the arguments of his sister, so did Toby’s tongue and fun prove too many for grandmother’s eloquence. I somehow think Toby must have been up to all this, for I think he had a peculiar love for my father ever after, and regarded grandmother from that hour with a careful and cool eye.Toby, when full grown, was a strong, coarse dog; coarse in shape, in countenance, in hair, and in manner. I used to think that, according to the Pythagorean doctrine, he must have been, or been going to be a Gilmerton carter. He was of the bull-terrier variety, coarsened through much mongrelism and a dubious and varied ancestry. His teeth were good, and he had a large skull, and a rich bark as of a dog three times his size, and a tail which I never saw equalled—indeed it was a tailper se; it was of immense girth and not short, equal throughout like a policeman’s baton; the machinery for working it was of great power, and acted in a way, as far as I have been able to discover, quite original. We called it his ruler.When he wished to get into the house, he first whined gently, then growled, then gave a sharp bark, and then came a resounding, mighty stroke which shook the house; this, after much study and watching, we found was done by his bringing the entire length of his solid tail flat upon the door, with a sudden and vigorous stroke; it was quite atour de forceor acoup de queue, and he was perfect in it at once, his firstbangauthoritative, having been as masterly and telling as his last.With all this inbred vulgar air, he was a dog of great moral excellence—affectionate, faithful, honest up to his light, with an odd humor as peculiar and as strong as his tail. My father, in his reserved way, was very fond of him, and there must have been very funny scenes with them, for we heard bursts of laughter issuing from his study when they two were by themselves; there was something in him that took that grave, beautiful, melancholy face. One can fancy him in the midst of his books, and sacred work and thoughts, pausing and looking at the secular Toby, who was looking out for a smile to begin his rough fun, and about to end by coursing andgurrin’round the room, upsetting my father’s books, laid out on the floor for consultation, and himself nearly at times, as he stood watching him—and off his guard and shaking with laughter. Toby had always a great desire to accompany my father up to town; this my father’s good taste and sense of dignity, besides his fear of losing his friend (a vain fear!), forbade, and as the decision of character of each was great and nearly equal, it was often a drawn game. Toby ultimately, by making it his entire object, triumphed. He usually was nowhere to be seen on my father leaving; he however saw him, and lay in wait at the head of the street, and up Leith Walkhe kept him in view from the opposite side like a detective, and then, when he knew it was hopeless to hound him home, he crossed unblushingly over, and joined company, excessively rejoiced of course.One Sunday he had gone with him to church, and left him at the vestry door. The second psalm was given out, and my father was sitting back in the pulpit, when the door at its back, up which he came from the vestry, was seen to move, and gently open, then, after a long pause, a black shining snout pushed its way steadily into the congregation, and was followed by Toby’s entire body. He looked somewhat abashed, but snuffing his friend, he advanced as if on thin ice, and not seeing him, put his forelegs on the pulpit, and behold there he was, his own familiar chum. I watched all this, and anything more beautiful than his look of happiness, of comfort, of entire ease when he beheld his friend,—the smoothing down of the anxious ears, the swing of gladness of that mighty tail,—I don’t expect soon to see. My father quietly opened the door, and Toby was at his feet and invisible to all but himself; had he sent old George Peaston, the “minister’s man,” to put him out, Toby would probably have shown his teeth, and astonished George. He slunk home as soon as he could, and never repeated that exploit.I never saw in any other dog the sudden transition from discretion, not to say abject cowardice, to blazing and permanent valor. From his earliest years he showed a general meanness of blood, inherited from many generations of starved, bekicked, and down-trodden forefathers and mothers, resulting in a condition of intense abjectness in all matters of personal fear; anybody, even a beggar, by agowland a threat of eye, could send himoff howling by anticipation, with that mighty tail between his legs. But it was not always so to be, and I had the privilege of seeing courage, reasonable, absolute, and for life, spring up in Toby at once, as did Athené from the skull of Jove. It happened thus:—Toby was in the way of hiding his culinary bones in the small gardens before his own and the neighboring doors. Mr. Scrymgeour, two doors off, a bulky, choleric, red-haired, red-faced man—torvo vultu—was, by the law of contrast, a great cultivator of flowers, and he had often scowled Toby into all but non-existence by a stamp of his foot and a glare of his eye. One day his gate being open, in walks Toby with a huge bone, and making a hole where Scrymgeour had two minutes before been planting some precious slip, the name of which on paper and on a stick Toby made very light of, substituted his bone, and was engaged covering it, or thinking he was covering it up with his shovelling nose (a very odd relic of paradise in the dog), when S. spied him through the inner glass door, and was out upon him like the Assyrian, with a terriblegowl. I watched them. Instantly Toby made straight at him with a roar too, and an eye more torve than Scrymgeour’s, who, retreating without reserve, fell prostrate, there is reason to believe, in his own lobby. Toby contented himself with proclaiming his victory at the door, and returning finished his bone-planting at his leisure; the enemy, who had scuttled behind the glass-door, glaring at him.From this moment Toby was an altered dog. Pluck at first sight was lord of all; from that time dated his first tremendous deliverance of tail against the door, which we called “come listen to my tail.” That veryevening he paid a visit to Leo, next door’s dog, a big, tyrannical bully and coward, which its master thought a Newfoundland, but whose pedigree we knew better; this brute continued the same system of chronic extermination which was interrupted at Lochend,—having Toby down among his feet, and threatening him with instant death two or three times a day. To him Toby paid a visit that very evening, down into his den, and walked about, as much as to say “Come on, Macduff!” but Macduff did not come on, and henceforward there was an armed neutrality, and they merely stiffened up and made their backs rigid, pretended each not to see the other, walking solemnly round, as is the manner of dogs. Toby worked his new-found faculty thoroughly, but with discretion. He killed cats, astonished beggars, kept his own in his own garden against all comers, and came off victorious in several well-fought battles; but he was not quarrelsome or foolhardy. It was very odd how his carriage changed, holding his head up, and how much pleasanter he was at home. To my father, next to William, who was his Humane Society man, he remained stanch. And what of his end? for the misery of dogs is that they die so soon, or as Sir Walter says, it is well they do; for if they lived as long as a Christian, and we liked them in proportion, and they then died, he said that was a thing he could not stand.His exit was miserable, and had a strange poetic or tragic relation to his entrance. My father was out of town; I was away in England. Whether it was that the absence of my father had relaxed his power of moral restraint, or whether through neglect of the servant he had been desperately hungry, or most likely both being true, Toby was discovered with the remains of a coldleg of mutton, on which he had made an ample meal;5this he was in vain endeavoring to plant as of old, in the hope of its remaining undiscovered till to-morrow’s hunger returned, the whole shank bone sticking up unmistakably. This was seen by our excellent and Radamanthine grandmother, who pronounced sentence on the instant; and next day, as William was leaving for the High School, did he in the sour morning, through an easterlyhaur, behold him “whom he saved from drowning,” and whom, with better results than in the case of Launce and Crab, he had taught, as if one should say, “thus would I teach a dog,” dangling by his own chain from his own lamp-post, one of his hind feet just touching the pavement, and his body preternaturally elongated.William found him dead and warm, and falling in with the milk-boy at the head of the street, questioned him, and discovered that he was the executioner, and had got twopence, he—Toby’s every morning crony, who met him and accompanied him up the street, and licked the outside of his can—had, with an eye to speed and convenience, and a want of taste, not to say principle and affection, horrible still to think of, suspended Toby’s animation beyond all hope. William instantly fell upon him, upsetting his milk and cream, and gave him a thorough licking, to his own intense relief; and, being late, he got from Pyper, who was a martinet, the customary palmies, which he bore with something approaching to pleasure. So died Toby; my father said little, but he missed and mourned his friend.There is reason to believe that by one of those curious intertwistings of existence, the milk-boy was that one of the drowning party who got the penny of the twopence.WYLIE.Our next friend was an exquisite shepherd’s dog; fleet, thin-flanked, dainty, and handsome as a small grayhound, with all the grace of silky waving black and tan hair. We got him thus. Being then young and keen botanists, and full of the knowledge and love of Tweedside, having been on every hill-top from Muckle Mendic to Hundleshope and the Lee Pen, and having fished every water from Tarth to the Leithen, we discovered early in spring that young Stewart, author of an excellent book on natural history, a young man of great promise and early death, had found theBuxbaumia aphylla, a beautiful and odd-looking moss, west of Newbie heights, in the very month we were that moment in. We resolved to start next day. We walked to Peebles, and then up Haystoun Glen to the cottage of Adam Cairns, the aged shepherd of the Newbie hirsel, of whom we knew, and who knew of us from his daughter, Nancy Cairns, a servant with Uncle Aitken of Callands. We found our way up the burn with difficulty, as the evening was getting dark; and on getting near the cottage heard them at worship. We got in, and made ourselves known, and got a famous tea, and such cream and oat cake!—old Adam looking on us as “clean dementit” to come out for “a bit moss,” which, however, he knew, and with some pride said he wouldtake us in the morning to the place. As we were going into a box bed for the night, two young men came in, and said they were “gaun to burn the water.” Off we set. It was a clear, dark, starlight, frosty night. They had their leisters and tar torches, and it was something worth seeing—the wild flame, the young fellows striking the fish coming to the light—how splendid they looked with the light on their scales, coming out of the darkness—the stumblings and quenchings suddenly of the lights, as the torch-bearer fell into a deep pool. We got home past midnight, and slept as we seldom sleep now. In the morning Adam, who had been long up, and had been up the “Hope” with his dog, when he saw we had wakened, told us there was four inches of snow, and we soon saw it was too true. So we had to go home without our cryptogamic prize.It turned out that Adam, who was an old man and frail, and had made some money, was going at Whitsunday to leave, and live with his son in Glasgow. We had been admiring the beauty and gentleness and perfect shape of Wylie, the finest colley I ever saw, and said, “What are you going to do with Wylie?” “’Deed,” says he, “I hardly ken. I canna think o’ sellin’ her, though she’s worth four pound, and she’ll no like the toun.” I said, “Would you let me have her?” and Adam, looking at her fondly—she came up instantly to him, and made of him—said, “Ay, I wull, if ye’ll be gude to her;” and it was settled that when Adam left for Glasgow she should be sent into Albany Street by the carrier.She came, and was at once taken to all our hearts, even grandmother liked her; and though she was often pensive, as if thinking of her master and her work onthe hills, she made herself at home, and behaved in all respects like a lady. When out with me, if she saw sheep in the streets or road, she got quite excited, and helped the work, and was curiously useful, the being so making her wonderfully happy. And so her little life went on, never doing wrong, always blithe and kind and beautiful. But some months after she came, there was a mystery about her: every Tuesday evening she disappeared; we tried to watch her, but in vain, she was always off by nineP.M., and was away all night, coming back next day wearied and all over mud, as if she had travelled far. She slept all next day. This went on for some months and we could make nothing of it. Poor dear creature, she looked at us wistfully when she came in, as if she would have told us if she could, and was especially fond, though tired.Well, one day I was walking across the Grassmarket, with Wylie at my heels, when two shepherds started, and looking at her, one said, “That’s her; that’s the wonderfu’ wee bitch that naebody kens.” I asked him what he meant, and he told me that for months past she had made her appearance by the first daylight at the “buchts” or sheep-pens in the cattle market, and worked incessantly, and to excellent purpose, in helping the shepherds to get their sheep and lambs in. The man said with a sort of transport, “She’s a perfect meeracle; flees about like a speerit, and never gangs wrang; wears but never grups, and beats a’ oor dowgs. She’s a perfect meeracle, and as soople as a maukin.” Then he related how they all knew her, and said, “There’s that wee fell yin; we’ll get them in noo.” They tried to coax her to stop and be caught, but no, she was gentle, but off; and for many a day that “wee fell yin” wasspoken of by these rough fellows. She continued this amateur work till she died, which she did in peace.It is very touching the regard the south-country shepherds have to their dogs. Professor Syme one day, many years ago, when living in Forres Street, was looking out of his window, and he saw a young shepherd striding down North Charlotte Street, as if making for his house; it was midsummer. The man had his dog with him, and Mr. Syme noticed that he followed the dog, and not it him, though he contrived to steer for the house. He came, and was ushered into his room; he wished advice about some ailment, and Mr. Syme saw that he had a bit of twine round the dog’s neck, which he let drop out of his hand when he entered the room. He asked him the meaning of this, and he explained that the magistrates had issued a mad-dog proclamation, commanding all dogs to be muzzled or led on pain of death. “And why do you go about as I saw you did before you came in to me?” “Oh,” said he, looking awkward, “I didna want Birkie to ken he was tied.” Where will you find truer courtesy and finer feeling? He didn’t want to hurt Birkie’s feelings.Mr. Carruthers of Inverness told me a new story of these wise sheep dogs. A butcher from Inverness had purchased some sheep at Dingwall, and giving them in charge to his dog, left the road. The dog drove them on, till coming to a toll, the toll-wife stood before the drove, demanding her dues. The dog looked at her, and, jumping on her back, crossed his forelegs over her arms. The sheep passed through, and the dog took his place behind them, and went on his way.RAB.Of Rab I have little to say, indeed have little right to speak of him as one of “our dogs;” but nobody will be sorry to hear anything of that noble fellow. Ailie, the day or two after the operation, when she was well and cheery, spoke about him, and said she would tell me fine stories when I came out, as I promised to do, to see her at Howgate. I asked her how James came to get him. She told me that one day she saw James coming down from Leadburn with the cart; he had been away west, getting eggs and butter, cheese and hens for Edinburgh. She saw he was in some trouble, and on looking, there was what she thought a young calf being dragged, or, as she called it, “haurled,” at the back of the cart. James was in front, and when he came up, very warm and very angry, she saw that there was a huge young dog tied to the cart, struggling and pulling back with all his might, and as she said “lookin’ fearsom.” James, who was out of breath and temper, being past his time, explained to Ailie, that this “muckle brute o’ a whalp” had been worrying sheep, and terrifying everybody up at Sir George Montgomery’s at Macbie Hill, and that Sir George had ordered him to be hanged, which, however, was sooner said than done, as “the thief” showed his intentions of dying hard. James came up just as Sir George had sent for his gun; and as the dog had more than once shown a liking for him, he said he “wad gie him a chance;” and so he tied him to his cart. Young Rab, fearing some mischief, had been entering a series of protests all the way, and nearly strangling himself to spite James and Jess, besidesgiving Jess more than usual to do. “I wish I had let Sir George pit that charge into him, the thrawn brute,” said James. But Ailie had seen that in his foreleg there was a splinter of wood, which he had likely got when objecting to be hanged, and that he was miserably lame. So she got James to leave him with her, and go straight into Edinburgh. She gave him water, and by her woman’s wit got his lame paw under a door, so that he couldn’t suddenly get at her, then with a quick firm hand she plucked out the splinter, and put in an ample meal. She went in some time after, taking no notice of him, and he came limping up, and laid his great jaws in her lap; from that moment they were “chief,” as she said, James finding him mansuete and civil when he returned.She said it was Rab’s habit to make his appearance exactly half an hour before his master, trotting in full of importance, as if to say, “He’s all right, he’ll be here.” One morning James came without him. He had left Edinburgh very early, and in coming near Auchindinny, at a lonely part of the road, a man sprang out on him, and demanded his money. James, who was a cool hand, said, “Weel a weel, let me get it,” and stepping back, he said to Rab, “Speak till him, my man.” In an instant Rab was standing over him, threatening strangulation if he stirred. James pushed on, leaving Rab in charge; he looked back, and saw that every attempt to rise was summarily put down. As he was telling Ailie the story, up came Rab with that great swing of his. It turned out that the robber was a Howgate lad, the worthless son of a neighbor, and Rab knowing him had let him cheaply off; the only thing, which was seen by a man from a field, was, that before letting him rise, he quenched (pro tempore)the fire of the eyes of the ruffian, by a familiar Gulliverian application of Hydraulics, which I need not further particularize. James, who did not know the way to tell an untruth, or embellish anything, told me this as what he called “a factpositeevely.”WASPWas a dark brindled bull-terrier, as pure in blood as Cruiser or Wild Dayrell. She was brought by my brother from Otley, in the West Riding. She was very handsome, fierce, and gentle, with a small, compact, finely-shaped head, and a pair of wonderful eyes,—as full of fire and of softness as Grisi’s; indeed she had to my eye a curious look of that wonderful genius—at once wild and fond. It was a fine sight to see her on the prowl across Bowden Moor, now cantering with her nose down, now gathered up on the top of a dyke, and with erect ears, looking across the wild like a moss-trooper out on business, keen and fell. She could do everything it became a dog to do, from killing an otter or a polecat, to watching and playing with a baby, and was as docile to her master as she was surly to all else. She was not quarrelsome, but “being in,” she would have pleased Polonius as much, as in being “ware of entrance.” She was never beaten, and she killed on the spot several of the country bullies who came out upon her when following her master in his rounds. She generally sent them off howling with one snap, but if this was not enough, she made an end of it.But it was as a mother that she shone; and to see the gypsy, Hagar-like creature nursing her occasional Ishmael—playingwith him, and fondling him all over, teaching his teeth to war, and with her eye and the curl of her lip daring any one but her master to touch him, was like seeing Grisi watching her darling “Gennaro,” who so little knew why and how much she loved him.Once when she had three pups, one of them died. For two days and nights she gave herself up to trying to bring it to life—licking it and turning it over and over, growling over it, and all but worrying it to awake it. She paid no attention to the living two, gave them no milk, flung them away with her teeth, and would have killed them, had they been allowed to remain with her. She was as one possessed, and neither ate, nor drank, nor slept, was heavy and miserable with her milk, and in such a state of excitement that no one could remove the dead pup.Early on the third day she was seen to take the pup in her mouth, and start across the fields towards the Tweed, striding like a race-horse—she plunged in, holding up her burden, and at the middle of the stream dropped it and swam swiftly ashore; then she stood and watched the little dark lump floating away, bobbing up and down with the current, and losing it at last far down, she made her way home, sought out the living two, devoured them with her love, carried them one by one to her lair, and gave herself up wholly to nurse them; you can fancy her mental and bodily happiness and relief when they were pulling away—and theirs.On one occasion my brother had lent her to a woman who lived in a lonely house, and whose husband was away for a time. She was a capital watch. One day an Italian with his organ came—first begging, then demanding money—showing that he knew she was alone,and that he meant to help himself, if she didn’t. She threatened to “lowse the dowg;” but as this was Greek to him, he pushed on. She had just time to set Wasp at him. It was very short work. She had him by the throat, pulled him and his organ down with a heavy crash, the organ giving a ludicrous sort of cry of musical pain. Wasp thinking this was from some creature within, possibly awhittret, left the ruffian, and set to work tooth and nail on the box. Its master slunk off, and with mingled fury and thankfulness watched her disembowelling his only means of an honest living. The woman good-naturedly took her off, and signed to the miscreant to make himself and his remains scarce. This he did with a scowl; and was found in the evening in the village, telling a series of lies to the watchmaker, and bribing him with a shilling to mend his pipes—“his kist o’ whussels.”JOCKWas insane from his birth; at first anamabilis insania, but ending in mischief and sudden death. He was an English terrier, fawn-colored; his mother’s nameVamp(Vampire), and his father’sDemon. He was more properlydaftthan mad; his courage, muscularity, and prodigious animal spirits making him insufferable, and never allowing one sane feature of himself any chance. No sooner was the street door open, than he was throttling the first dog passing, bringing upon himself and me endless grief. Cats he tossed up into the air, and crushed their spines as they fell. Old ladies he upset by jumping over their heads; old gentlemenby running between their legs. At home, he would think nothing of leaping through the tea-things, upsetting the urn, cream, etc., and at dinner the same sort of thing. I believe if I could have found time to thrash him sufficiently, and let him be a year older, we might have kept him; but having upset an Earl when the streets were muddy, I had to part with him. He was sent to a clergyman in the island of Westray, one of the Orkneys; and though he had a wretched voyage, and was as sick as any dog, he signalized the first moment of his arrival at the manse, by strangling an ancient monkey, or “puggy,” the pet of the minister,—who was a bachelor,—and the wonder of the island. Jock henceforward took to evil courses, extracting the kidneys of the best young rams, driving whole hirsels down steep places into the sea, till at last all the guns of Westray were pointed at him, as he stood at bay under a huge rock on the shore, and blew him into space. I always regret his end, and blame myself for sparing the rod. OfDUCHIEI have already spoken; her oddities were endless. We had and still have a dear friend,—“Cousin Susan” she is called by many who are not her cousins—a perfect lady, and, though hopelessly deaf, as gentle and contented as was ever Griselda with the full use of her ears; quite as great a pet, in a word, of us all as Duchie was of ours. One day we found her mourning the death of a cat, a great playfellow of the Sputchard’s, and her small Grace was with us when we were condoling withher, and we saw that she looked very wistfully at Duchie. I wrote on the slate, “Would you like her?” and she through her tears said, “You know that would never do.” But it did do. We left Duchie that very night, and though she paid us frequent visits, she was Cousin Susan’s for life. I fear indulgence dulled her moral sense. She was an immense happiness to her mistress, whose silent and lonely days she made glad with her oddity and mirth. And yet the small creature, old, toothless, and blind, domineered over her gentle friend—threatening her sometimes if she presumed to remove the small Fury from the inside of her own bed, into which it pleased her to creep. Indeed, I believe it is too true, though it was inferred only, that her mistress and friend spent a great part of a winter night in trying to coax her dear little ruffian out of the centre of the bed. One day the cook asked what she would have for dinner: “I would like a mutton chop, but then, you know, Duchie likes minced veal better!” The faithful and happy little creature died at a great age, of natural decay.But time would fail me, and I fear patience would fail you, my reader, were I to tell you ofCrab, ofJohn Pym, ofPuck, and of the rest.Crab, the Mugger’s dog, grave, with deep-set, melancholy eyes, as of a nobleman (say the Master of Ravenswood) in disguise, large visaged, shaggy, indomitable, come of the pure Piper Allan’s breed. This Piper Allan, you must know, lived some two hundred years ago in Cocquet Water, piping like Homer, from place to place, and famous not less for his dog than for his music, his news and his songs. The Earl of Northumberland, of his day, offered the piper asmall farm for his dog, but after deliberating for a day Allan said, “Na, na, ma Lord, keep yir ferum; what wud a piper do wi’ a ferum?” From this dog descended Davidson of Hyndlee’s breed, the original Dandie-Dinmont, and Crab could count his kin up to him. He had a great look of the Right Honorable Edward Ellice, and had much of his energy andwecht; had there been a dog House of Commons, Crab would have spoken as seldom, and been as great a power in the house, as the formidable and faithful time-out-of-mind member for Coventry.John Pymwas a smaller dog than Crab, of more fashionable blood, being a son of Mr. Somner’s famousShem, whose father and brother are said to have been found dead in a drain into which the hounds had run a fox. It had three entrances: the father was put in at one hole, the son at another, and speedily the fox bolted out at the third, but no appearance of the little terriers, and on digging, they were found dead, locked in each other’s jaws; they had met, and it being dark, and there being no time for explanations, they had throttled each other. John was made of the same sort of stuff, and was as combative and victorious as his great namesake, and not unlike him in some of his not so creditable qualities. He must, I think, have been related to a certain dog to whom “life was full o’ sairiousness,” but in John’s case the same cause produced an opposite effect. John was gay and light-hearted, even when there was not “enuff of fechtin,” which, however, seldom happened, there being a market every week in Melrose, and John appearing most punctually at the cross to challenge all comers, and being short legged, he inveigled every dog into an engagement by first attackinghim, and then falling down on his back, in which posture he latterly fought and won all his battles.What can I say ofPuck6—the thoroughbred—the simple-hearted—the purloiner of eggs warm from the hen—the flutterer of all manner of Volscians—the bandy-legged, dear, old, dilapidated buffer? I got him from my brother, and only parted with him because William’s stock was gone. He had to the end of life a simplicity which was quite touching. One summer day—a dog-day—when all dogs found straying were hauled away to the police-office, and killed off in twenties with strychnine, I met Puck trotting along Princes Street with a policeman, a rope round his neck, he looking up in the fatal, official, but kindly countenance in the most artless and cheerful manner, wagging his tail and trotting along. In ten minutes he would have been in the next world; for I am one of those who believe dogshavea next world, and why not? Puck ended his days as the best dog in Roxburghshire.Placide quiescas!DICKStill lives, and long may he live! As he was never born, possibly he may never die; be it so, he will miss us when we are gone. I could say much of him, but agree with the lively and admirable Dr. Jortin, when, inhis dedication of hisRemarks on Ecclesiastical Historyto the then (1752) Archbishop of Canterbury, he excuses himself for not following the modern custom of praising his Patron, by reminding his Grace “that it was a custom amongst the ancients,not to sacrifice to heroes till after sunset.” I defer my sacrifice till Dick’s sun is set.I think every family should have a dog; it is like having a perpetual baby; it is the plaything and crony of the whole house. It keeps them all young. All unite upon Dick. And then he tells no tales, betrays no secrets, never sulks, asks no troublesome questions, never gets into debt, never coming down late for breakfast, or coming in through his Chubbtoo earlyto bed—is always ready for a bit of fun, lies in wait for it, and you may, if choleric, to your relief, kick him instead of some one else, who would not take it so meekly, and, moreover, would certainly not, as he does, ask your pardon for being kicked.Never put a collar on your dog—it only gets him stolen; give him only one meal a day, and let that, as Dame Dorothy, Sir Thomas Browne’s wife, would say, be “rayther under.” Wash him once a week, and always wash the soap out; and let him be carefully combed and brushed twice a week.By the bye, I was wrong in saying that it was Burns who said Man is the God of the Dog—he got it from Bacon’sEssay on Atheism.
“The misery of keeping a dog, is his dying so soon; but to be sure, if he lived for fifty years, and then died, what would become of me?”—Sir Walter Scott.
“There is in every animal’s eye a dim image and gleam of humanity, a flash of strange light through which their life looks out and up to our great mystery of command over them, and claims the fellowship of the creature if not of the soul.”—Ruskin.
To Sir Walter and Lady Trevelyan’sglum and faithful“PETER,”with much regard.
OUR DOGS.
I wasbitten severely by a little dog when with my mother at Moffat Wells, being then three years of age, and I have remained “bitten” ever since in the matter of dogs. I remember that little dog, and can at this moment not only recall my pain and terror—I have no doubt I was to blame—but also her face; and were I allowed to search among the shades in the cynic Elysian fields, I could pick her out still. All my life I have been familiar with these faithful creatures, making friends of them, and speaking to them; and the only time I ever addressed the public, about a year after being bitten, was at the farm of Kirklaw Hill, near Biggar, when the text, given out from an empty cart in which the ploughmen had placed me, was “Jacob’s dog,” and my entire sermon was as follows:—“Some say that Jacob had a black dog (theovery long), and some say that Jacob had a white dog, butI(imagine the presumption of four years!) say Jacob had a brown dog, and a brown dog it shall be.”
I had many intimacies from this time onwards—Bawtie, of the inn; Keeper, the carrier’s bull-terrier; Tiger, a huge tawny mastiff from Edinburgh, which I think must have been an uncle of Rab’s; all the sheep dogsat Callands—Spring, Mavis, Yarrow, Swallow, Cheviot, etc.; but it was not till I was at college, and my brother at the High School, that we possessed a dog.
Was the most utterly shabby, vulgar, mean-looking cur I ever beheld: in one word,a tyke. He had not one good feature except his teeth and eyes, and his bark, if that can be called a feature. He was not ugly enough to be interesting; his color black and white, his shape leggy and clumsy; altogether what Sydney Smith would have called an extraordinarily ordinary dog; and, as I have said, not even greatly ugly, or, as the Aberdonians have it,bonnie wi’ ill-fauredness. My brother William found him the centre of attraction to a multitude of small blackguards who were drowning him slowly in Lochend Loch, doing their best to lengthen out the process, and secure the greatest amount of fun with the nearest approach to death. Even then Toby showed his great intellect by pretending to be dead, and thus gaining time and an inspiration. William bought him for twopence, and as he had it not, the boys accompanied him to Pilrig Street, when I happened to meet him, and giving the twopence to the biggest boy, had the satisfaction of seeing a general engagement of much severity, during which the twopence disappeared; one penny going off with a very small and swift boy, and the other vanishing hopelessly into the grating of a drain.
Toby was for weeks in the house unbeknown to any one but ourselves two and the cook, and from my grandmother’s love of tidiness and hatred of dogs and of dirt,I believe she would have expelled “him whom we saved from drowning,” had not he, in his straightforward way, walked into my father’s bedroom one night when he was bathing his feet, and introduced himself with a wag of his tail, intimating a general willingness to be happy. My father laughed most heartily, and at last Toby, having got his way to his bare feet, and having begun to lick his soles and between his toes with his small rough tongue, my father gave such an unwonted shout of laughter, that we—grandmother, sisters, and all of us—went in. Grandmother might argue with all her energy and skill, but as surely as the pressure of Tom Jones’ infantile fist upon Mr. Allworthy’s forefinger undid all the arguments of his sister, so did Toby’s tongue and fun prove too many for grandmother’s eloquence. I somehow think Toby must have been up to all this, for I think he had a peculiar love for my father ever after, and regarded grandmother from that hour with a careful and cool eye.
Toby, when full grown, was a strong, coarse dog; coarse in shape, in countenance, in hair, and in manner. I used to think that, according to the Pythagorean doctrine, he must have been, or been going to be a Gilmerton carter. He was of the bull-terrier variety, coarsened through much mongrelism and a dubious and varied ancestry. His teeth were good, and he had a large skull, and a rich bark as of a dog three times his size, and a tail which I never saw equalled—indeed it was a tailper se; it was of immense girth and not short, equal throughout like a policeman’s baton; the machinery for working it was of great power, and acted in a way, as far as I have been able to discover, quite original. We called it his ruler.
When he wished to get into the house, he first whined gently, then growled, then gave a sharp bark, and then came a resounding, mighty stroke which shook the house; this, after much study and watching, we found was done by his bringing the entire length of his solid tail flat upon the door, with a sudden and vigorous stroke; it was quite atour de forceor acoup de queue, and he was perfect in it at once, his firstbangauthoritative, having been as masterly and telling as his last.
With all this inbred vulgar air, he was a dog of great moral excellence—affectionate, faithful, honest up to his light, with an odd humor as peculiar and as strong as his tail. My father, in his reserved way, was very fond of him, and there must have been very funny scenes with them, for we heard bursts of laughter issuing from his study when they two were by themselves; there was something in him that took that grave, beautiful, melancholy face. One can fancy him in the midst of his books, and sacred work and thoughts, pausing and looking at the secular Toby, who was looking out for a smile to begin his rough fun, and about to end by coursing andgurrin’round the room, upsetting my father’s books, laid out on the floor for consultation, and himself nearly at times, as he stood watching him—and off his guard and shaking with laughter. Toby had always a great desire to accompany my father up to town; this my father’s good taste and sense of dignity, besides his fear of losing his friend (a vain fear!), forbade, and as the decision of character of each was great and nearly equal, it was often a drawn game. Toby ultimately, by making it his entire object, triumphed. He usually was nowhere to be seen on my father leaving; he however saw him, and lay in wait at the head of the street, and up Leith Walkhe kept him in view from the opposite side like a detective, and then, when he knew it was hopeless to hound him home, he crossed unblushingly over, and joined company, excessively rejoiced of course.
One Sunday he had gone with him to church, and left him at the vestry door. The second psalm was given out, and my father was sitting back in the pulpit, when the door at its back, up which he came from the vestry, was seen to move, and gently open, then, after a long pause, a black shining snout pushed its way steadily into the congregation, and was followed by Toby’s entire body. He looked somewhat abashed, but snuffing his friend, he advanced as if on thin ice, and not seeing him, put his forelegs on the pulpit, and behold there he was, his own familiar chum. I watched all this, and anything more beautiful than his look of happiness, of comfort, of entire ease when he beheld his friend,—the smoothing down of the anxious ears, the swing of gladness of that mighty tail,—I don’t expect soon to see. My father quietly opened the door, and Toby was at his feet and invisible to all but himself; had he sent old George Peaston, the “minister’s man,” to put him out, Toby would probably have shown his teeth, and astonished George. He slunk home as soon as he could, and never repeated that exploit.
I never saw in any other dog the sudden transition from discretion, not to say abject cowardice, to blazing and permanent valor. From his earliest years he showed a general meanness of blood, inherited from many generations of starved, bekicked, and down-trodden forefathers and mothers, resulting in a condition of intense abjectness in all matters of personal fear; anybody, even a beggar, by agowland a threat of eye, could send himoff howling by anticipation, with that mighty tail between his legs. But it was not always so to be, and I had the privilege of seeing courage, reasonable, absolute, and for life, spring up in Toby at once, as did Athené from the skull of Jove. It happened thus:—
Toby was in the way of hiding his culinary bones in the small gardens before his own and the neighboring doors. Mr. Scrymgeour, two doors off, a bulky, choleric, red-haired, red-faced man—torvo vultu—was, by the law of contrast, a great cultivator of flowers, and he had often scowled Toby into all but non-existence by a stamp of his foot and a glare of his eye. One day his gate being open, in walks Toby with a huge bone, and making a hole where Scrymgeour had two minutes before been planting some precious slip, the name of which on paper and on a stick Toby made very light of, substituted his bone, and was engaged covering it, or thinking he was covering it up with his shovelling nose (a very odd relic of paradise in the dog), when S. spied him through the inner glass door, and was out upon him like the Assyrian, with a terriblegowl. I watched them. Instantly Toby made straight at him with a roar too, and an eye more torve than Scrymgeour’s, who, retreating without reserve, fell prostrate, there is reason to believe, in his own lobby. Toby contented himself with proclaiming his victory at the door, and returning finished his bone-planting at his leisure; the enemy, who had scuttled behind the glass-door, glaring at him.
From this moment Toby was an altered dog. Pluck at first sight was lord of all; from that time dated his first tremendous deliverance of tail against the door, which we called “come listen to my tail.” That veryevening he paid a visit to Leo, next door’s dog, a big, tyrannical bully and coward, which its master thought a Newfoundland, but whose pedigree we knew better; this brute continued the same system of chronic extermination which was interrupted at Lochend,—having Toby down among his feet, and threatening him with instant death two or three times a day. To him Toby paid a visit that very evening, down into his den, and walked about, as much as to say “Come on, Macduff!” but Macduff did not come on, and henceforward there was an armed neutrality, and they merely stiffened up and made their backs rigid, pretended each not to see the other, walking solemnly round, as is the manner of dogs. Toby worked his new-found faculty thoroughly, but with discretion. He killed cats, astonished beggars, kept his own in his own garden against all comers, and came off victorious in several well-fought battles; but he was not quarrelsome or foolhardy. It was very odd how his carriage changed, holding his head up, and how much pleasanter he was at home. To my father, next to William, who was his Humane Society man, he remained stanch. And what of his end? for the misery of dogs is that they die so soon, or as Sir Walter says, it is well they do; for if they lived as long as a Christian, and we liked them in proportion, and they then died, he said that was a thing he could not stand.
His exit was miserable, and had a strange poetic or tragic relation to his entrance. My father was out of town; I was away in England. Whether it was that the absence of my father had relaxed his power of moral restraint, or whether through neglect of the servant he had been desperately hungry, or most likely both being true, Toby was discovered with the remains of a coldleg of mutton, on which he had made an ample meal;5this he was in vain endeavoring to plant as of old, in the hope of its remaining undiscovered till to-morrow’s hunger returned, the whole shank bone sticking up unmistakably. This was seen by our excellent and Radamanthine grandmother, who pronounced sentence on the instant; and next day, as William was leaving for the High School, did he in the sour morning, through an easterlyhaur, behold him “whom he saved from drowning,” and whom, with better results than in the case of Launce and Crab, he had taught, as if one should say, “thus would I teach a dog,” dangling by his own chain from his own lamp-post, one of his hind feet just touching the pavement, and his body preternaturally elongated.
William found him dead and warm, and falling in with the milk-boy at the head of the street, questioned him, and discovered that he was the executioner, and had got twopence, he—Toby’s every morning crony, who met him and accompanied him up the street, and licked the outside of his can—had, with an eye to speed and convenience, and a want of taste, not to say principle and affection, horrible still to think of, suspended Toby’s animation beyond all hope. William instantly fell upon him, upsetting his milk and cream, and gave him a thorough licking, to his own intense relief; and, being late, he got from Pyper, who was a martinet, the customary palmies, which he bore with something approaching to pleasure. So died Toby; my father said little, but he missed and mourned his friend.
There is reason to believe that by one of those curious intertwistings of existence, the milk-boy was that one of the drowning party who got the penny of the twopence.
Our next friend was an exquisite shepherd’s dog; fleet, thin-flanked, dainty, and handsome as a small grayhound, with all the grace of silky waving black and tan hair. We got him thus. Being then young and keen botanists, and full of the knowledge and love of Tweedside, having been on every hill-top from Muckle Mendic to Hundleshope and the Lee Pen, and having fished every water from Tarth to the Leithen, we discovered early in spring that young Stewart, author of an excellent book on natural history, a young man of great promise and early death, had found theBuxbaumia aphylla, a beautiful and odd-looking moss, west of Newbie heights, in the very month we were that moment in. We resolved to start next day. We walked to Peebles, and then up Haystoun Glen to the cottage of Adam Cairns, the aged shepherd of the Newbie hirsel, of whom we knew, and who knew of us from his daughter, Nancy Cairns, a servant with Uncle Aitken of Callands. We found our way up the burn with difficulty, as the evening was getting dark; and on getting near the cottage heard them at worship. We got in, and made ourselves known, and got a famous tea, and such cream and oat cake!—old Adam looking on us as “clean dementit” to come out for “a bit moss,” which, however, he knew, and with some pride said he wouldtake us in the morning to the place. As we were going into a box bed for the night, two young men came in, and said they were “gaun to burn the water.” Off we set. It was a clear, dark, starlight, frosty night. They had their leisters and tar torches, and it was something worth seeing—the wild flame, the young fellows striking the fish coming to the light—how splendid they looked with the light on their scales, coming out of the darkness—the stumblings and quenchings suddenly of the lights, as the torch-bearer fell into a deep pool. We got home past midnight, and slept as we seldom sleep now. In the morning Adam, who had been long up, and had been up the “Hope” with his dog, when he saw we had wakened, told us there was four inches of snow, and we soon saw it was too true. So we had to go home without our cryptogamic prize.
It turned out that Adam, who was an old man and frail, and had made some money, was going at Whitsunday to leave, and live with his son in Glasgow. We had been admiring the beauty and gentleness and perfect shape of Wylie, the finest colley I ever saw, and said, “What are you going to do with Wylie?” “’Deed,” says he, “I hardly ken. I canna think o’ sellin’ her, though she’s worth four pound, and she’ll no like the toun.” I said, “Would you let me have her?” and Adam, looking at her fondly—she came up instantly to him, and made of him—said, “Ay, I wull, if ye’ll be gude to her;” and it was settled that when Adam left for Glasgow she should be sent into Albany Street by the carrier.
She came, and was at once taken to all our hearts, even grandmother liked her; and though she was often pensive, as if thinking of her master and her work onthe hills, she made herself at home, and behaved in all respects like a lady. When out with me, if she saw sheep in the streets or road, she got quite excited, and helped the work, and was curiously useful, the being so making her wonderfully happy. And so her little life went on, never doing wrong, always blithe and kind and beautiful. But some months after she came, there was a mystery about her: every Tuesday evening she disappeared; we tried to watch her, but in vain, she was always off by nineP.M., and was away all night, coming back next day wearied and all over mud, as if she had travelled far. She slept all next day. This went on for some months and we could make nothing of it. Poor dear creature, she looked at us wistfully when she came in, as if she would have told us if she could, and was especially fond, though tired.
Well, one day I was walking across the Grassmarket, with Wylie at my heels, when two shepherds started, and looking at her, one said, “That’s her; that’s the wonderfu’ wee bitch that naebody kens.” I asked him what he meant, and he told me that for months past she had made her appearance by the first daylight at the “buchts” or sheep-pens in the cattle market, and worked incessantly, and to excellent purpose, in helping the shepherds to get their sheep and lambs in. The man said with a sort of transport, “She’s a perfect meeracle; flees about like a speerit, and never gangs wrang; wears but never grups, and beats a’ oor dowgs. She’s a perfect meeracle, and as soople as a maukin.” Then he related how they all knew her, and said, “There’s that wee fell yin; we’ll get them in noo.” They tried to coax her to stop and be caught, but no, she was gentle, but off; and for many a day that “wee fell yin” wasspoken of by these rough fellows. She continued this amateur work till she died, which she did in peace.
It is very touching the regard the south-country shepherds have to their dogs. Professor Syme one day, many years ago, when living in Forres Street, was looking out of his window, and he saw a young shepherd striding down North Charlotte Street, as if making for his house; it was midsummer. The man had his dog with him, and Mr. Syme noticed that he followed the dog, and not it him, though he contrived to steer for the house. He came, and was ushered into his room; he wished advice about some ailment, and Mr. Syme saw that he had a bit of twine round the dog’s neck, which he let drop out of his hand when he entered the room. He asked him the meaning of this, and he explained that the magistrates had issued a mad-dog proclamation, commanding all dogs to be muzzled or led on pain of death. “And why do you go about as I saw you did before you came in to me?” “Oh,” said he, looking awkward, “I didna want Birkie to ken he was tied.” Where will you find truer courtesy and finer feeling? He didn’t want to hurt Birkie’s feelings.
Mr. Carruthers of Inverness told me a new story of these wise sheep dogs. A butcher from Inverness had purchased some sheep at Dingwall, and giving them in charge to his dog, left the road. The dog drove them on, till coming to a toll, the toll-wife stood before the drove, demanding her dues. The dog looked at her, and, jumping on her back, crossed his forelegs over her arms. The sheep passed through, and the dog took his place behind them, and went on his way.
Of Rab I have little to say, indeed have little right to speak of him as one of “our dogs;” but nobody will be sorry to hear anything of that noble fellow. Ailie, the day or two after the operation, when she was well and cheery, spoke about him, and said she would tell me fine stories when I came out, as I promised to do, to see her at Howgate. I asked her how James came to get him. She told me that one day she saw James coming down from Leadburn with the cart; he had been away west, getting eggs and butter, cheese and hens for Edinburgh. She saw he was in some trouble, and on looking, there was what she thought a young calf being dragged, or, as she called it, “haurled,” at the back of the cart. James was in front, and when he came up, very warm and very angry, she saw that there was a huge young dog tied to the cart, struggling and pulling back with all his might, and as she said “lookin’ fearsom.” James, who was out of breath and temper, being past his time, explained to Ailie, that this “muckle brute o’ a whalp” had been worrying sheep, and terrifying everybody up at Sir George Montgomery’s at Macbie Hill, and that Sir George had ordered him to be hanged, which, however, was sooner said than done, as “the thief” showed his intentions of dying hard. James came up just as Sir George had sent for his gun; and as the dog had more than once shown a liking for him, he said he “wad gie him a chance;” and so he tied him to his cart. Young Rab, fearing some mischief, had been entering a series of protests all the way, and nearly strangling himself to spite James and Jess, besidesgiving Jess more than usual to do. “I wish I had let Sir George pit that charge into him, the thrawn brute,” said James. But Ailie had seen that in his foreleg there was a splinter of wood, which he had likely got when objecting to be hanged, and that he was miserably lame. So she got James to leave him with her, and go straight into Edinburgh. She gave him water, and by her woman’s wit got his lame paw under a door, so that he couldn’t suddenly get at her, then with a quick firm hand she plucked out the splinter, and put in an ample meal. She went in some time after, taking no notice of him, and he came limping up, and laid his great jaws in her lap; from that moment they were “chief,” as she said, James finding him mansuete and civil when he returned.
She said it was Rab’s habit to make his appearance exactly half an hour before his master, trotting in full of importance, as if to say, “He’s all right, he’ll be here.” One morning James came without him. He had left Edinburgh very early, and in coming near Auchindinny, at a lonely part of the road, a man sprang out on him, and demanded his money. James, who was a cool hand, said, “Weel a weel, let me get it,” and stepping back, he said to Rab, “Speak till him, my man.” In an instant Rab was standing over him, threatening strangulation if he stirred. James pushed on, leaving Rab in charge; he looked back, and saw that every attempt to rise was summarily put down. As he was telling Ailie the story, up came Rab with that great swing of his. It turned out that the robber was a Howgate lad, the worthless son of a neighbor, and Rab knowing him had let him cheaply off; the only thing, which was seen by a man from a field, was, that before letting him rise, he quenched (pro tempore)the fire of the eyes of the ruffian, by a familiar Gulliverian application of Hydraulics, which I need not further particularize. James, who did not know the way to tell an untruth, or embellish anything, told me this as what he called “a factpositeevely.”
Was a dark brindled bull-terrier, as pure in blood as Cruiser or Wild Dayrell. She was brought by my brother from Otley, in the West Riding. She was very handsome, fierce, and gentle, with a small, compact, finely-shaped head, and a pair of wonderful eyes,—as full of fire and of softness as Grisi’s; indeed she had to my eye a curious look of that wonderful genius—at once wild and fond. It was a fine sight to see her on the prowl across Bowden Moor, now cantering with her nose down, now gathered up on the top of a dyke, and with erect ears, looking across the wild like a moss-trooper out on business, keen and fell. She could do everything it became a dog to do, from killing an otter or a polecat, to watching and playing with a baby, and was as docile to her master as she was surly to all else. She was not quarrelsome, but “being in,” she would have pleased Polonius as much, as in being “ware of entrance.” She was never beaten, and she killed on the spot several of the country bullies who came out upon her when following her master in his rounds. She generally sent them off howling with one snap, but if this was not enough, she made an end of it.
But it was as a mother that she shone; and to see the gypsy, Hagar-like creature nursing her occasional Ishmael—playingwith him, and fondling him all over, teaching his teeth to war, and with her eye and the curl of her lip daring any one but her master to touch him, was like seeing Grisi watching her darling “Gennaro,” who so little knew why and how much she loved him.
Once when she had three pups, one of them died. For two days and nights she gave herself up to trying to bring it to life—licking it and turning it over and over, growling over it, and all but worrying it to awake it. She paid no attention to the living two, gave them no milk, flung them away with her teeth, and would have killed them, had they been allowed to remain with her. She was as one possessed, and neither ate, nor drank, nor slept, was heavy and miserable with her milk, and in such a state of excitement that no one could remove the dead pup.
Early on the third day she was seen to take the pup in her mouth, and start across the fields towards the Tweed, striding like a race-horse—she plunged in, holding up her burden, and at the middle of the stream dropped it and swam swiftly ashore; then she stood and watched the little dark lump floating away, bobbing up and down with the current, and losing it at last far down, she made her way home, sought out the living two, devoured them with her love, carried them one by one to her lair, and gave herself up wholly to nurse them; you can fancy her mental and bodily happiness and relief when they were pulling away—and theirs.
On one occasion my brother had lent her to a woman who lived in a lonely house, and whose husband was away for a time. She was a capital watch. One day an Italian with his organ came—first begging, then demanding money—showing that he knew she was alone,and that he meant to help himself, if she didn’t. She threatened to “lowse the dowg;” but as this was Greek to him, he pushed on. She had just time to set Wasp at him. It was very short work. She had him by the throat, pulled him and his organ down with a heavy crash, the organ giving a ludicrous sort of cry of musical pain. Wasp thinking this was from some creature within, possibly awhittret, left the ruffian, and set to work tooth and nail on the box. Its master slunk off, and with mingled fury and thankfulness watched her disembowelling his only means of an honest living. The woman good-naturedly took her off, and signed to the miscreant to make himself and his remains scarce. This he did with a scowl; and was found in the evening in the village, telling a series of lies to the watchmaker, and bribing him with a shilling to mend his pipes—“his kist o’ whussels.”
Was insane from his birth; at first anamabilis insania, but ending in mischief and sudden death. He was an English terrier, fawn-colored; his mother’s nameVamp(Vampire), and his father’sDemon. He was more properlydaftthan mad; his courage, muscularity, and prodigious animal spirits making him insufferable, and never allowing one sane feature of himself any chance. No sooner was the street door open, than he was throttling the first dog passing, bringing upon himself and me endless grief. Cats he tossed up into the air, and crushed their spines as they fell. Old ladies he upset by jumping over their heads; old gentlemenby running between their legs. At home, he would think nothing of leaping through the tea-things, upsetting the urn, cream, etc., and at dinner the same sort of thing. I believe if I could have found time to thrash him sufficiently, and let him be a year older, we might have kept him; but having upset an Earl when the streets were muddy, I had to part with him. He was sent to a clergyman in the island of Westray, one of the Orkneys; and though he had a wretched voyage, and was as sick as any dog, he signalized the first moment of his arrival at the manse, by strangling an ancient monkey, or “puggy,” the pet of the minister,—who was a bachelor,—and the wonder of the island. Jock henceforward took to evil courses, extracting the kidneys of the best young rams, driving whole hirsels down steep places into the sea, till at last all the guns of Westray were pointed at him, as he stood at bay under a huge rock on the shore, and blew him into space. I always regret his end, and blame myself for sparing the rod. Of
I have already spoken; her oddities were endless. We had and still have a dear friend,—“Cousin Susan” she is called by many who are not her cousins—a perfect lady, and, though hopelessly deaf, as gentle and contented as was ever Griselda with the full use of her ears; quite as great a pet, in a word, of us all as Duchie was of ours. One day we found her mourning the death of a cat, a great playfellow of the Sputchard’s, and her small Grace was with us when we were condoling withher, and we saw that she looked very wistfully at Duchie. I wrote on the slate, “Would you like her?” and she through her tears said, “You know that would never do.” But it did do. We left Duchie that very night, and though she paid us frequent visits, she was Cousin Susan’s for life. I fear indulgence dulled her moral sense. She was an immense happiness to her mistress, whose silent and lonely days she made glad with her oddity and mirth. And yet the small creature, old, toothless, and blind, domineered over her gentle friend—threatening her sometimes if she presumed to remove the small Fury from the inside of her own bed, into which it pleased her to creep. Indeed, I believe it is too true, though it was inferred only, that her mistress and friend spent a great part of a winter night in trying to coax her dear little ruffian out of the centre of the bed. One day the cook asked what she would have for dinner: “I would like a mutton chop, but then, you know, Duchie likes minced veal better!” The faithful and happy little creature died at a great age, of natural decay.
But time would fail me, and I fear patience would fail you, my reader, were I to tell you ofCrab, ofJohn Pym, ofPuck, and of the rest.Crab, the Mugger’s dog, grave, with deep-set, melancholy eyes, as of a nobleman (say the Master of Ravenswood) in disguise, large visaged, shaggy, indomitable, come of the pure Piper Allan’s breed. This Piper Allan, you must know, lived some two hundred years ago in Cocquet Water, piping like Homer, from place to place, and famous not less for his dog than for his music, his news and his songs. The Earl of Northumberland, of his day, offered the piper asmall farm for his dog, but after deliberating for a day Allan said, “Na, na, ma Lord, keep yir ferum; what wud a piper do wi’ a ferum?” From this dog descended Davidson of Hyndlee’s breed, the original Dandie-Dinmont, and Crab could count his kin up to him. He had a great look of the Right Honorable Edward Ellice, and had much of his energy andwecht; had there been a dog House of Commons, Crab would have spoken as seldom, and been as great a power in the house, as the formidable and faithful time-out-of-mind member for Coventry.
John Pymwas a smaller dog than Crab, of more fashionable blood, being a son of Mr. Somner’s famousShem, whose father and brother are said to have been found dead in a drain into which the hounds had run a fox. It had three entrances: the father was put in at one hole, the son at another, and speedily the fox bolted out at the third, but no appearance of the little terriers, and on digging, they were found dead, locked in each other’s jaws; they had met, and it being dark, and there being no time for explanations, they had throttled each other. John was made of the same sort of stuff, and was as combative and victorious as his great namesake, and not unlike him in some of his not so creditable qualities. He must, I think, have been related to a certain dog to whom “life was full o’ sairiousness,” but in John’s case the same cause produced an opposite effect. John was gay and light-hearted, even when there was not “enuff of fechtin,” which, however, seldom happened, there being a market every week in Melrose, and John appearing most punctually at the cross to challenge all comers, and being short legged, he inveigled every dog into an engagement by first attackinghim, and then falling down on his back, in which posture he latterly fought and won all his battles.
What can I say ofPuck6—the thoroughbred—the simple-hearted—the purloiner of eggs warm from the hen—the flutterer of all manner of Volscians—the bandy-legged, dear, old, dilapidated buffer? I got him from my brother, and only parted with him because William’s stock was gone. He had to the end of life a simplicity which was quite touching. One summer day—a dog-day—when all dogs found straying were hauled away to the police-office, and killed off in twenties with strychnine, I met Puck trotting along Princes Street with a policeman, a rope round his neck, he looking up in the fatal, official, but kindly countenance in the most artless and cheerful manner, wagging his tail and trotting along. In ten minutes he would have been in the next world; for I am one of those who believe dogshavea next world, and why not? Puck ended his days as the best dog in Roxburghshire.Placide quiescas!
Still lives, and long may he live! As he was never born, possibly he may never die; be it so, he will miss us when we are gone. I could say much of him, but agree with the lively and admirable Dr. Jortin, when, inhis dedication of hisRemarks on Ecclesiastical Historyto the then (1752) Archbishop of Canterbury, he excuses himself for not following the modern custom of praising his Patron, by reminding his Grace “that it was a custom amongst the ancients,not to sacrifice to heroes till after sunset.” I defer my sacrifice till Dick’s sun is set.
I think every family should have a dog; it is like having a perpetual baby; it is the plaything and crony of the whole house. It keeps them all young. All unite upon Dick. And then he tells no tales, betrays no secrets, never sulks, asks no troublesome questions, never gets into debt, never coming down late for breakfast, or coming in through his Chubbtoo earlyto bed—is always ready for a bit of fun, lies in wait for it, and you may, if choleric, to your relief, kick him instead of some one else, who would not take it so meekly, and, moreover, would certainly not, as he does, ask your pardon for being kicked.
Never put a collar on your dog—it only gets him stolen; give him only one meal a day, and let that, as Dame Dorothy, Sir Thomas Browne’s wife, would say, be “rayther under.” Wash him once a week, and always wash the soap out; and let him be carefully combed and brushed twice a week.
By the bye, I was wrong in saying that it was Burns who said Man is the God of the Dog—he got it from Bacon’sEssay on Atheism.