[A] In addition to the instinct of obedience which in itself rendered Wallace tractable, the great dog had a little weakness, of which I have heard his master say he made use in conducting his four-footed retainer’s education. “Wallace wight” “would have gone round the world” for a bit of sugar—the usual reward of a fait accompli.
[B] However, I have heard of an old terrier who had lived many years leading an entirely domestic life in a large town, and who, on being taken by its owners to country quarters—which happened, unfortunately, to be in a game country—ran off the very night of his arrival, hunted the whole summer night through, and turned up the next morning, after his friends had resigned all hope of recovering him. He was dead tired, and in a few hours was crying out under paroxysms of rheumatism, which his unwonted exposure, together with his weight of years, brought upon him.
CHAPTER VII.
MY EARLY FRIENDS.
ONE of the remotest visions of my infancy—dim as the pearly dawn itself—is of two dogs called Flora and Danger, priest-grey and brown-and-yellow terriers respectively, which filled a prominent place in my baby regard. They soon vanished from the scene, and some time elapsed before they were succeeded by Fido—a small, sleek, short-haired, brown dog, resembling an English terrier, which was partly my own property, and, much more than any doll or toy, the darling of my early childhood.
I fancy Fido was not very well descended, and that his small size was due to accident, or to some arresting process practised in his puppyhood. But he was a well-made little dog; he had a keen tiny face, with erect ears; and he was amazingly agile in his habits. In fact his agility, together with his audacity, brought about his untimely death—the manner of which remains, at this distance of time, more impressed on my mind than any incident in his short life.
I remember the scene and circumstances as if the event had happened yesterday. My mother had strolled beyond the garden to “the front of the brae,” as it was called, or the brow of the green, grassy hill on which the old white house was built. It commanded a wide stretch of links or downs, met by the blue girdle of the Frith, having for its fringe, all along the coast, clusters of ancient villages—fishing or trading—with red-tiled or blue-slated houses, and round-belfried or sharp-pointed steeples of parish kirks.