Sarah Tytler

“ She will go about her usual avocations, and even faintly wag her tail and make a formal show of joy at her friends’ advances, or on any occasion of hilarity. There will be no idle baying at the moon, or wild howling in the dead of night, causing the blood of other watchers to curdle, in Flora’s case; she knows how to suffer and be silent, nay, to put the best face on suffering. Only the old dog’s tread will grow heavier and heavier, in proportion to the increasing heaviness of her heart, as she stalks about her business. ”

“ It is even better known and more widely prized than his exquisitely comical sick dog, that is so sorry for itself, while the keeper is examining its paw; and his deeply pathetic “Last Mourner,” in which the shepherd’s dog keeps solitary watch by its master’s coffin.
The noble mastiff lies stately and serene, his vast bulk tempered by his perfect proportions, and by a gait worthy of the king of dogs. His well-opened hazel eyes look with honest straightforwardness full in your face. His huge ears hang down quietly. His jaws are closed and overlapped by his deep jowl. ”

“ On the whole, Prince had a tolerably happy youth, for a dog of his condition, under Jack’s auspices. It might not have been so improving as one could wish, but he learnt some proficiency in shifting for himself, and being philosophical when nothing better offered—a valuable lesson for more than dogs.
Everything comes to an end, and few things sooner, alas! than the hand-to-mouth drifting with the tide of careless, improvident working people. There came a time, at no distant date in Jack’s and Prince’s household, in which there were no longer treats and dainties going. ”

“ I am afraid I cannot call him anything except a plain-looking dog, with no nonsense about him.
But he is not destitute of solid advantages, on which he justly piques himself, in that big body scarred with the traces of many a combat in which he has come off the victor.
He may be little to boast of where speed, agility, keenness of scent, quickness and sureness of sight, discipline, docility, and splendid sagacity are desired, but he has always his vigour and endurance to fall back upon, and they are a tower of strength in themselves. ”

“ She sits to the artist, full of the anxiety and desire which you can read in a thousand signs—by her wide-apart legs, the one foot slightly raised, as on tiptoe—by the head bent in the attitude of intent listening—by the fixed eyes, a little mournful, as deeply-loving eyes are apt to be—by the hair rising on the crest of the back—by the very squat of the haunches, and the utterly flat and flaccid condition of the great tail laid at rest on the floor; for you will please to observe that Flora, though hearkening with all her ears, does not catch the faintest murmur of sound. ”

“ If any one calls such an action pathetic, so cannot I. If any one admires such fickleness and faithlessness where true and tried friendship was concerned, such annihilation of right principle and self-respect before the idle fancy of a day, I do not, and never will.
Tot and Nelly had no resource but to keep Dash a close prisoner, in order to save him from the worst death a dog can die, till Cæsar was guilty of another fierce outbreak, and this time, as it had a man and not a dog for its victim, he was summarily sentenced to the death which he richly deserved. ”

“ He did not nestle to Jack’s heart or lick his dirty hand, for he was never a demonstrative dog, but he cocked the ears—short even then, before they had undergone the hideous process of cropping—looked up with his small beads of eyes in his captor’s face, as if acknowledging his master, and then gave one short, stiff wag of his stump of a tail, as if appending his signature—the signature of the puppy-father to the dog whose word was his bond—to the bargain. ”

“ FLORA was a species of dog that had a dash of the bloodhound in her. She was a great, somewhat gaunt creature, standing high on the legs, and with a broad sagacious jowl, as different as possible from Carlo’s fine, supercilious, pensive mouth. Flora, like many of her sex—especially those of them whose personal qualities are not their great distinction, and who have not, therefore, been followed and fawned upon by a crowd of fools—was a dog of strong affections. ”

“ The world looked on as at the crushing of a butterfly, or the introducing of a tragic pathos into the soulless life of a fairy. But there was a soul in this stunted human fairy, while a butterfly was the ancients’ emblem of immortality; so good Master Arundel comforted himself, as he strove with all his might to introduce a supernatural element which should give a new aspect to the apparently pitiless destruction, and cause it to be, after all, a miracle of divine mercy. ”

“ From his introduction to the farm as a puppy, Dick entertained an immense admiration—rapidly progressing, in a dog of his frank, confident character, into a trustful, rather encroaching affection—for the veteran Wallace. The mastiff responded by testifying the most amiable indulgence for his liliputian friend. The indulgence proved its own reward, for there was no question that the eager, joyous little dog brought some of its own eagerness and joy into what was becoming the fading, failing life of his mighty ally. ”

“ Measure him from the tip of his long nose to the point of his long tail, from his small head and slender throat to his delicate haunches and fine legs, and do not forget his large soft eyes and exquisite skin. Is he not grace personified?—grace, not dignity, for dignity implies power. Indeed there are critics who would limit Carlo’s dominant attribute to superlative elegance, since they allege that perfect grace demands natural vigour, and vigour or power is exactly the quality which the dog lacks. Being a high-bred hound, he may be fleet as a bird—fleet as Master Magrath of racing renown ”

“ Roy and Reine’s master was a Cavalier, a man in the prime of life, who had seen the loss of a good many things he valued, before the civil war deprived him at last of his already dilapidated old court, and sent him adrift to wander in disguise here and there, and lie in hiding till better days came round, and the King should enjoy his own again. He was a Master Neville of the Alders, himself a scion, and his estate a fragment, of what had been, so far back as the Wars of the Roses, the mighty Neville family, with their vast domains. ”

“ In the season allowed to Flora for cooling down and contrition, while she had the knowledge forced upon her that she could no longer rush to greet Harry with an open face and a clear conscience, but must be sought out by the lad, smarting under a fellow-feeling with her disgrace, Flora became so overpowered by the consequences of her previous self-indulgence of restless grief and longing, that she cast to the winds the silent endurance which had been from her youth a marked feature in the big, brave dog’s character. ”

“ I have heard his master tell that, when Wallace was a young dog, one winter night he took more than his own share of the hearthrug, on which his master’s solitary chair was also drawn up. The man, desiring more space to move in, gave the dog an unceremonious push, which roused in him such [118] lurking ill-humour as besets us all at times; only Wallace was a mighty brute, unsupplied with the reins of reason and conscience wherewith to check his passions, and furnished on the other hand with the instinct of quick retaliation and fierce, disproportioned revenge. ”

“ Master Neville dwelt once more at the court, with Dame Hynd reinstated as his housekeeper; but it could not be said of him, as it was recorded of the royal Stewarts and Bourbons, that in their absence from their kingdoms they had learned nothing and forgotten nothing. He was a more sober-minded and gentler-hearted man for his troubles. One incident which he never forgot was that half-hour in the wood when the ferns were getting sere, and the leaves growing red and yellow—when Reine danced and Roy died, and their master sat and looked on, a broken-down, forlorn man. ”

“ Both dog and scene—the table littered with books and writing materials, the riding-gloves, the fine old bell glass and flask of rare old wine, the foils, together with that glimpse through the window of the castle turret—are products of centuries of civilisation and generations of culture. Now look at the dog himself, as refined as any fine lady, for no fine gentleman was ever so absolutely removed from the faintest trace of rude nature—not to say from caddishness or snobbishness. Carlo is positively burdened with refinement. ”

“ He had been trained, like his master, to count as the best part of his time those hours which were spent in the open air, and in active exercise. Coursing was exactly to Carlo what stalking deer, riding to hounds, and rowing a boat were to his master. When the dog’s blood and breeding were up, he could make a good fight in his doggish sport. ”

“ It was an evidence of the degree to which social claims are permitted to prevail in every circle. “De Vaux wishes to have the dog constantly with him,” said De Vaux’s mother, as if the desire of the heir settled the question; “and Carlo is such a nice gentlemanly dog. I have been so frightened for De Vaux’s taking a fancy to a hideous turnspit, or a rough German boar-hound, or a fighting bull-terrier, with a beauty spot over one eye, or even to some wretched cur. Young men are so odd now-a-days,” she finished with a sigh of relief. ”

“ The dog had stolen out and kept at a safe distance in the rear, till she considered that she was beyond the danger of being marched home, when she capered to the front, and her unconscious companion not only perceived who was her attendant, but discovered, to her mingled diversion and chagrin, that the dog was dressed in that supremely absurd pair of pantaloons, plentifully bespattered with mud. ”

“ The dog, faithful to the single principle of duty that was left in him, threatened the intruder as furiously as if Prince himself were not an arrant rogue, or as if he were acting out the adage, “Set a thief to catch a thief.” ”

“ But Carlo could not go everywhere with his master—could not even be so much with him as formerly, after De Vaux grew a busy man with ever-increasing engagements; so that it was all the better for the dog that he had a brave little lady by whose side he could trot on her numberless errands, until he had no time left to fall back into his old painful consideration of the stumbles, the blunders, the coarseness and vulgarity of his neighbours, or to indulge in morbid moping and pining. ”

“ A contemporary of Skatta’s was a huge black and white watch-dog, named “Foam,” a good-natured, but formidable creature, which, when it was let loose, used to come bounding to greet us, and such was its impetus that, when it planted a paw on each shoulder, it caused each one of us to reel and stagger under its caress. ”

“ De Vaux not yet twenty-three, Carlo not turned ten years.
There was only one element of light to be thankful for in this, among the many mysteries of existence. When you thought of the low life of Prince and his friend Jack, with all their shortcomings and deprivations, and, in the middle of it, how courageously—though it might be with a stolid courage—the dog and the lad endured misfortunes unmerited as well as merited, and what an absolute hearty relish remained to them wherewith to seize and enjoy every scrap of pleasure that came in their way in the course of the day’s difficulties ”

“ Nobody will care so much that she shall not suffer as I will. And Flo will do anything for me. She will even jump over the quarry when I tell her, and not believe her senses that it can hurt her, because it is I who bid her do it,” he ended, unable to restrain a sob.
Mrs. Bloomfield hesitated, while she was conscious of some troublesome moisture in her eyes. It was true what Harry urged, that he had a right—and she was the last woman to deny a right, if he claimed it—to save Flora from pain, and make her death as inconceivable to her to the last moment as was possible. ”