Therefore Bunko was really paying Tip a compliment when he told that doggie he was more "subtle than any other beast of the field," and like the serpent in the book of Genesis.
Nevertheless, although Bunko made a companion of "Tippie," as he called him, whenever he could get him to make a companion of, he would not have permitted anyone to say the dog had reason.
"I have na muckle reason mysel'," he told the old fisherman one day, "but poor Tippie's only a breet" [brute].
Then he scratched his head as he looked at his four-footed friend. "Ma! conscience though," he added, "just look at they bewitchin' brown een [eyes] o' his. What a lot o' wisdom the Good Lord has lent him!"
The fisherman thought this was certainly a new light in which to view the controversy of Reason versus Instinct.
Well, both the friends went to the igloo, as Fred called the whale-house, early that afternoon, for Bunko had caught Tippitty and carried him off in triumph. It was no easy matter either, to carry Tip; for if Tip chose to wriggle you couldn't hold him in one arm as you might a terrier, you required both, and even then if the doggie made up his mind to wallop but once, he was out of your grasp and off like an eel.
"You're no goin' to the woods the day, I can tell you, Tippie," Bunko had told him. "We have gentry folks comin' to tea, so you maun come and help me."
Bunko was dressed in his best, in his Sunday clothes in fact, and a fearful and wonderful rig it was—a Scotch bonnet as broad as a griddle with an immense red top on it, a soldier's scarlet coat, and a pair of tartan trowsers rather frayed at the bottom.
If you had told Bunko that the bonnet was too big for him he would probably have replied: "If ye dinna like it, ye can look the ither road. Anything sets [becomes] a weel-faured face, if it were only the dish-clout."
In that great rugged wall of rocks that went stretching away out into the western sea there was just one break, and this occurred a little beyond the poet's cave. A kind of glen or small ravine it formed. At low-water you could approach it from the sea between two tall frowning rocks, but if the tide were up you must descend into it by a perilous little pathway leading from the cliff above. Only once, in the memory of the villagers then living, had this glen been invaded by a high-tide. This had occurred some years before the date of the commencement of our story, and, strange to say, when the sea receded it left behind it a stranded whale.