“Under kind treatment she developed into a very handsome dog, never large, but wonderfully graceful, leaping and bounding like a deer. Her back was a reddish-brown, her chest and paws beautifully white; she looked bright and intelligent, and her eyes had a certain wistful expression, which is well reproduced in the accompanying photograph. She was not particularly clever. She seemed to say, like one of Tennyson’s heroines:
“‘I cannot understand, I love.’
“She was always with me, and in places which I frequent, she was thoroughly well-known; she lay opposite me in the carriage, on the deck of my steam-launch, with her nose up in the air, sniffing the fresh breeze to windward. (‘See the kind-eyed old collie; on the deck, in the sunshine, she loves to recline,’ sang my friend Ashby-Sterry of her in one of his pretty Lazy Minstrel Lays.)
“She followed me in my long rides on horseback, over down and through wood, ranging far away on her own business, but ever and anon coming back to see how I was getting on. She lay at my feet in my library, and slept on a couch at the bottom of my bed. About eighteen months before her death, she developed signs of failing sight, and gradually grew totally blind. This blindness was the cause of an accident on which I do not care to dwell, but which necessitated her destruction; and on the twenty-seventh of July she passed away without a pang. She lies buried in the garden here, at the foot of a flag-staff, and on her prettily turfed grave is the following inscription:
Here lies
Nelly
A Collie Dog;
for nine years a much loved friend,
gentle, affectionate, and true.