I am a working man, or rather have been till I got the rheumatics, and as such I naturally stick to my own class and prefer associating with those of my own sort, and therefore I always keep working dogs. I have often bred aristocratic dogs, dogs descended from great prize-winners and with long pedigrees, and among them I have had some good ones, honest and true; but as a rule I must say my experience proves that the shorter the pedigree the better the dog, and now if I could get them I should like to keep dogs that never had a father. Some people I know call me a cad, a clod, a chaw-bacon, etc., and they call my dogs curs and mongrels. Such men talk nonsense and First of all, I never give a lot of money for a dog—how can I with rats at twopence each?—but, if I can, I drop on a likely-looking If Chance is of any family I should think her mother was a setter and her father a bob-tail sheep-dog; but, then, I can't make out where she got her legs! She is red and white, with a perfect setter's head. She has the hind parts of a sheep-dog and evidently never had a tail; and her legs, which are very thick, would be short for a big terrier. Such are her looks, which certainly are not much to speak of; but if I had the pen of a Sir Walter Scott I could not do credit to the perfection No, her forte is to find a rat. She is always in and out, up the bank, through the hedge, down the bank; not a tuft of grass escapes her, and she would hunt down each side of Regent Street and in and out of the carriages if she found herself there. She lives hunting. Nothing ever escapes her; one sniff at the deepest and most turn-about She has one peculiarity. When she followed George Adams home, seven years ago, she was shy and scared; but, as it was a cold night, George, being a kind-hearted fellow, invited her to step indoors, an invitation she accepted in a frightened sort of way. On the hearth sat a little girl of three years old, eating her supper, and Chance, doubtless feeling very hungry, came and sat down in front of her and watched her with a wistful If Chance has no tail, the next dog on the list, "Tinker," makes up the average. He is a little black, hard-coated dog, with the head of a greyhound and tail of a foxhound. His head is nearly as long as his body, and his tail is just a little longer. In all ways he Then on my list next comes "Grindum," a mongrel bull-terrier, just the tenderest hearted, mildest dispositioned dog that ever killed a rat. He has but a poor nose and is not clever, but he has one strong point, which he developed for himself without being taught. It is this: when I am ferreting a thick hairy bank with a big ditch, Grindum always goes some ten yards off and places himself in the ditch, and, let the excitement be what it will, he never moves; and Not far from where I lived there was, in a most out-of-the-way corner on a common, an old sand-pit, and in this a miserable dilapidated cottage, consisting of two rooms. This for some years had been empty, but one fine morning was discovered to be inhabited by a man, his wife and two children—a boy of twelve and a girl of seven—and a bull-terrier. No one knew anything about them or where they had come from, and when the landlord of the hut went to eject them, he found them Our parson called on them three times—the first time the wife told him they did not like strangers and parsons in particular; the second time the husband told him to clear out sharp, or he would do him a mischief; and the third time the man took up a knife and began sharpening it, preparatory, he said, to cutting the parson's throat! Two months after this the man, after sitting drinking in the village pot-house all the morning, stepped round to an old mid-wife and asked her "to come and lay his wife out." The woman went and did her work and said nothing at the time, but later on it was whispered about that she had told some of her pals that "the poor crittur was black and blue, and that it was on her mind that the husband had murdered her!" After this, as I passed the cottage, I often Two or three months passed, during which the man was constantly drinking at the village public-house; but he always left at sundown—"to look after the kids," he said. Then there was a poaching fray on a nobleman's estate near. Six keepers came on five poachers one moonlight night. There was a hard fight, and at last the keepers took two of the men and the other three bolted, but one was recognized as the man from the sand-pit and was "wanted" by the police. A few nights after this I was walking down a lane in the dark near my house, when the sand-pit man stepped out of the I led my new dog home and tied him up in the corner of an open wood-shed, giving him a bundle of straw and a dish of I sat up late that night reading, and all the time in a remote corner of my mind the sand-pit man, the two children and the dog kept turning about, till at last, about midnight or later, I thought I would go to bed; but before doing so I made up my mind that I would see if my new dog was all right. I lit a lantern and stepped out of the door and found it was blowing and snowing and biting cold. Mercifully I persevered and reached the wood-shed, and what I saw there by the light of my lantern did startle me. There was the bull-dog sure enough lying curled up in the straw blinking hard at me, but—could I believe my eyes?—there lying with him, with their arms entwined round each other and round the dog, were the two children from the sand-pit fast asleep, but looking so I will give place to no man living at rat-catching and minding dogs, but here was a pretty mess, for I am no good with little children; so putting down my lantern, I hurried back to the house and got two rugs and with them wrapped the children and dog up snugly. Then I went in and woke up my wife, who had already gone to bed, and called some other women who were in the house, and after telling them what I had found, I made up a big fire in the kitchen and put on some water to boil. In a very few minutes my wife was downstairs and battling her way with me off to the wood-shed. I untied the dog and moved him away from the children. This woke them both, and they sat up and rubbed their eyes, and the poor boy appeared almost scared to death, but the little girl was quite quiet, and My wife is really smart with little children, and in half no time she was on her knees crooning over them, and soon she had the girl in her arms; but when I attempted to pick up the boy he only screamed and struggled, and kept calling out, "Grindum, Grindum! I won't leave Grindum. I shall be killed if I leave Grindum. Let me stay with Grindum." I assured him he should not be separated from Grindum "never no more," and at last I partially quieted him, and he allowed me to carry him into the kitchen and place him on a stool in front of the fire with his sister, while his beloved Grindum sat by his side blinking as if nothing unusual had taken place, and as if he had done the same each night for the last three months and felt a little bored by it. The first thing to be done, my wife said, was to feed the children, and while she and the other women busied about getting it ready, I sat and watched them. Both were remarkably pretty; both dark, with finely cut features, big eyes and thick soft black hair; but yet in different ways both had something sad about them. The boy never sat still for a moment, but kept glancing fearfully at me, then at the women, and then at the door, as if he expected something dreadful to happen, and all the time kept grasping the arm of his little sister with one hand as if for protection, and clinging to the soft skin of Grindum's neck with the other. If he caught my eye, or if I spoke to him, he flinched as if I had struck him, and turned livid and tugged so hard at Grindum's skin that the poor dog's eyes were pulled into mere slits, through which I could see he yet went on blinking at the fire. The girl sat half turned round to Soon hot basins of bread and milk were prepared, which both children eat ravenously, and then they were put into steaming hot baths, washed, dried, combed, and wrapped in blankets; but when we attempted to take them up to the nice warm beds that had been prepared for them, there was the same wild terrified cry from the boy for Grindum; and to pacify him the dog had to be taken How those two children found their way that night through a blinding snow-storm to their only living friend, the dear blinking Grindum, I never could find out. All I could ever get from the boy was, "Oh, I always go where Grindum goes!" and the little girl could only say, "Jack took me." My wife says angels guided them. Maybe she's right, but I hardly think angels would be likely to go about on such a night; still my wife went out in the snow and wind to the shed and got out of her snug bed to do it, but then she put on a pea jacket and clogs, and that makes a difference. This is a tiring long story to write, and I have not quite done it yet, for I must finish with the sand-pit man. He was tried, convicted and got three years. A year after he had been in prison he tried to escape by getting over a high wall, but in doing so he fell from the top and broke his back. He lingered some days and seemed to find a pleasure in telling the prison parson of all his misdeeds and in boasting of them. There was a long list, but only the last part of his story will serve for "the use of schools." It appears from what he said that, after he had given me the dog, he had intended to steal back to his house and take the two children to a deep pond and there drown them. Then, free from family ties, he hoped to get away and ship himself off to America. He also said that in a fit of rage he had thrashed his wife to death with his fists, and that his boy from having seen him do it had It was an ugly story, and I am glad to say with the death of the sand-pit man the miserable part of the children's life ended. The girl is now twelve years old and has never left us. She is as sharp as a needle and as honest as old Chance and as good. She is having a good education, thanks to our Rector's wife, and could if need be earn her own livelihood, but we are not going ever to part with her. The boy Jack was a great trouble to us at first. For months he would not be parted for a moment, day or night, from Grindum, and the dog actually had to go to school with him; but the master utterly failed to teach the boy even as far as A B C in his alpha Jack never mentions the past, and I should be inclined to think he had forgotten it, only if he is parted from Grindum for a short time he becomes wild looking about the eyes again and restless. At such times his sister, who mothers him much, will sit by Just two words more about Grindum and I have done. One is that the first time Grindum caught a rat, he picked it up by its hind leg, and the rat made its teeth meet through his nose. He softly put the rat down and it escaped, and I made my sides ache and greatly astonished all the other dogs by laughing at this great soft beast as he sat on his haunches licking the blood as it trickled from his nose, and staring up into the sky with a far-off vacant look, blinking worse than ever. The other word is this. Though Grindum is a bull-dog with an awful "Crush your Now to continue my lesson on ratting dogs. I have two others, Pepper and Wasp Wasp is specially good at water, and I have taught him to come to me directly a rat is bolted with a plunge into a pond, and I carry her high up in my arms round the pond, and when the rat approaches the side, Wasp from her high vantage ground will dive down upon it and have it in an instant. There! that is all for to-day, young gentlemen. Resume your Cicero, and, while you are preparing it, I will go to my room and look over the impositions I set you yesterday. It is understood that for "look over impositions" we may read, "Smoke cavendish in a short black pipe." |