Page:In bad company and other stories.djvu/483

 plateaux and savage solitudes, for the scattered, half-wild flocks, has an air of seriousness and responsibility. There is but little frolic and gamesomeness about him. The dogs of Ettrick and Yarrow, accustomed to snow and the blasts of an iron winter, claim kinship with him. Compelled to act on his own discretion, he tracks outliers, finds and collects his flock in all weathers.

'Sirrah, ma mon, they're awa!' says James Hogg to his wonderful collie, the 'dark-grey puppy' that he bought for a pound, if I mistake not. The dog, in the drear darkness of a snowstorm, goes forth, and hours afterwards is found guarding the four hundred lost lambs, not one being missing.

So when muster-day comes, the New Zealand collie makes for the mountain peaks: on the lonely plain far above the snow-line, where in severe seasons a hundred sheep may be found dead and frozen, he beats and quarters his country, till he finds and brings down to the appointed place all the straggling lots that may have summered there.

Independently of the qualities necessary for the successful mobilisation of sheep, the collie is, perhaps, of all the sub-varieties of the canine race, the most faithful and sympathetic. Time after time has one observed the tramping shepherd or swagman and his dog. Poor and despised, 'remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow,' the forlorn wayfarer had one staunch friend—one faithful ally—that regarded not his poverty, his lowly condition, his lack of self-denial. Who has not marked the tramp asleep sub Jove at daylight, with scant shelter or covering, his watchful dog sitting near, prepared to show his teeth, or indeed do something more, at the nearer approach of the stranger? The dog of the imprisoned shepherd, immured by Sir Hugo de Pentonville for inebriety, lies stretched disconsolately before the prison gate, howling at intervals, apparently in deepest despair, betraying on the other hand the most frantic joy at his release. The railway favourite goes heavily, mourning as unmistakably as a Christian—more sincerely than some—in abstracted gloom, melancholy gait, and aimless daily search for his master, untimely slain by the remorseless Juggernaut. A hundred times has one caught the watchful eye of affection with which the collie regards his ragged owner, as if fearing to lose the least word or gesture.