Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859

V >> Various >> Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20

Reverting to times when I was a boy, I remember me of a generation of
bandy-legged, foxy little curs, long of body, short of limb, tight of
skin, and "scant of breath," which were regarded as the legitimate
descendants of a superseded class,--the Turnspit of good old times. The
daily round of duty of that useful _aide-de-cuisine_ transpired in the
revolution of a wheel, along the monotonous journey of which he
cantered, as a squirrel does in his rolling cage, keeping in motion, by
his professional exertions, the wheels and spinners of the spit upon
which the joint was kept turning before the fire. The tight skin of
this ugly dog was evidently a provision of Nature to secure him from
entanglement with the machinery amid which his business was conducted.
Had a Scotch terrier, for instance, whiskered and plumed, descended
from his own more aristocratic circle to disport himself in that where
turnspit was the principal mover,--the kitchen-wheel,--he might have
found himself cogged, and caught up, and spitted, and associated
promiscuously with leg of mutton as roasted hare; in which capacity he
might eventually have been eaten with currant-jelly and considerable
relish, receiving more honor, perhaps, "in that connection," than had
ever in his lifetime been lavished on him as a member of society.

But Turnspit's profession is a thing of the past, his very existence a
myth. The roasting-jack, with a wind-up weight by which the spit was
turned, cut him out first of all; other inventions further diminished
his importance. But the tea-kettle--which he somewhat resembled in
figure, by-the-by--scalded him clean off the face of creation; for the
bright steam-engine, attached nowadays to the kitchens of our principal
hotels, has given a new turn to affairs, ruling the roast after a
fashion that sets back old Turnspit into the remotest corner under the
backstairs of the Dark Ages. I have alluded to his alleged descendants,
as pointed out to my observation in boyhood; but they were an effete
and degenerate race, purposeless, and wallowing much with the pigs,
whom their grandsires would have recognized only to roast.

In one instance only, and that on this side of the Atlantic, do I
remember having been introduced to any dog whose profession was at all
analogous to that of the turnspit of other days. Falling into
conversation with an old Dutch-Yankee farmer, in a remote and very
rural district, I made some remarks about his dog, which was a very
large, heavy one, of that no-particular-kind happily classified by the
comprehensive natural philosophers of the barn-floor as "yellow dog."
Farmer assured me that this fine fellow--whose name I am ashamed to say
I have forgotten--did all the churning of the farm-dairy by imparting
his motive power to a wheel. This piece of ingenuity, Farmer informed
me, was originally and exclusively an inspiration from the intellect
which animated his, Farmer's, proper clod; nor was he greatly
exhilarated when I narrated to him the tradition of the turnspit, whose
memory, I regret to record, he spurned as that of a "mean cuss,"
destitute of that poetry which dwelleth in the pastoral associations of
the dairy.

Although not strictly in connection with the subject of this article, I
will here relate a story told to me, on the same occasion, by that old
farmer, because it struck me as being rather a good one, and is not
particularly long.

Seeing that I took notice of a smock-frocked rustic employed in
foddering the cattle,--a rustic whose legs and accent were to me
exclusively reminiscent of the pleasant roads and lanes of cheery
Somersetshire,--Farmer informed me that he was a newish importation,
having made his appearance about there early in the previous winter.
While snow, of such quality and in such quantity as they have it in
that region, was yet a novelty to the bumpkin, he was dispatched on
horseback, one day, to the neighboring village, strict instructions
being given him to ride carefully in the middle of the track, as,
treading in the deep snow, the horse might "ball,"--an expression
applied to taking up snow in the hollow of the hoof, which causes the
animal to stumble. An unusually long time elapsed before the messenger
made his appearance from his mission, and then he was seen making his
way painfully through the snow, leading the horse after him by the
bridle.

"What's wrong now?" inquired Farmer, as he glanced at the animal's
knees; "been down, I guess; did Old Horse ball?"

"Noa," replied Bumpkin, "a didn't joost bawl, but a groonted
consoomedly every toime a coom down. Oi thowt a wur a-gwoan to bawl the
last toime we coom down together, and zo oi joost stayed down and
walked 'im whoam."

When doggy men beyond ocean talk about a terrier, they usually
pronounce it _tarrier_, and not _terrier_, as we mostly call him on
this bank of the Atlantic. There is no authority for the former
pronunciation, that I know of, beyond usage, which, however, is much
taken as a standard in England. Thus, an English merchant will talk to
you about his _clarks_, an American about his _clurks_. The French word
_terrier_--derived, of course, from _terre_--signifies not only the
dog, but a burrow in the earth; a kind of retreat in which such dogs
are supposed to pass a portion of their existence, occupied in the
subterrene branches of the chase. It means, also, a land-roll or
register. In Lower Canada, which is essentially France, I recollect the
label, _"Papier Terrier,"_ upon the door of a public-land-office. A
friend of mine, clandestinely and under cover of darkness, removed the
label, substituting for it a scurrilous one setting forth "Pasteboard
Poodle," an announcement which did not appear to convey any particular
idea whatever to the unsettled mind of the haggard provincial _chef du
bureau_, as it flashed upon him next morning in the light of the glad
young autumn day. But, reverting to pronunciation, _tare_-ier would, of
course, more correctly reverberate the sound of the French original
than either of the other usages, while it would possess the advantage
of conveying a suggestion of that proclivity for tearing, so
characteristic of the animal designated by the term. On this important
question the learned philologists wrangle. For my part, I stick to
_tarrier_, which comes "oncommon handy," as the horse-dealer hinted,
when reproved by the Cambridge student for reducing a noble animal
nearly to the level of a donkey by calling him "an 'oss."

And of all the terrier tribe, there is no quainter little fellow than
he of the Island of Skye,--known to his friends and admirers as the
"Skye dog." This little animal, which, in length of spine, shortness of
legs, wildness of hair, and litheness of movement, resembles one of
those long, hirsute caterpillars oft-times to be observed by the happy
rambler in the country, as it promenades across his path, possesses
many distinctive traits, which separate him, in a manner, from Dog in
general, assimilating him somewhat, indeed, to the _ferce_, which find
in rapine and carnage the subsistence which Nature evidently has not
intended that they should realize in communion with man. The peculiar
odor of the fox is his, though in a mitigated degree. He loves to make
a lair under the bushes by tearing up the turf with his teeth and paws,
and to lie in it. He is of a shy and reserved disposition, and usually
more lively at night than by day. These are attributes of beasts of
prey. Unlike all other members of the terrier family, he cares nothing
about rats. He will sit down and bark in a tone of contempt at one
turned out before him in a close passage or room, declining, in fact,
to recognize rats as game, unless entered at them while very young. I
speak only of the pure, unmixed Isle-of-Skye dog, or "tassel terrier,"
as he is sometimes called by rabbit-hunters,--a breed difficult to
obtain in perfection, and one which is particularly scarce in this
country. The proper game or quarry of this animal is the otter, which
he does not hesitate to follow into his very burrow in the river-banks;
nor is he afraid to attack one nearly double his size.

Having, time after time, possessed several of these dogs, verified as
being derived from the best stock on the island, from which their
parents--who understood no language but Gaelic--were brought direct, I
have noted some of their odd, whimsical ways, a few of which I will
illustrate, taking for my exponent one very remarkable little fellow
who was a genuine type of his kind.

This animal was one of the smallest of his family, and of a color
uncommon among them; for they are mostly either of a yellowish dun, or
of that slaty mouse-color known among dog-fanciers as "blue,"--a tint,
by the way, particularly appropriate for a dog of Skye. Sometimes they
are black; but Sambo, better known to his familiars as Sam, was of a
sooty brindle, with a very dark muzzle, and eyes burning out like black
stars from the cloud of shaggy hair that mantled upon his brow. Next to
the shortness of his legs, the length of his body was one of the most
remarkable physical freaks I remember to have observed; neither of
these attributes, however, having a chance of notice in comparison with
the quantity and denseness of his long, soft hair,--for the coat of a
true Skye dog is fleecy, rather than wiry. It was the joint result of
the shortness of his legs and the length of his beard that the fatter
appendage continually swept the ground,--an inconvenience which I once
undertook to remedy by trimming it off short with scissors. No Turk
could have more indignantly resented the process than did that small
quadruped,--his Celtic feelings being so severely wounded by it, in
fact, that he abstained from sustenance for three days, putting himself
into moral sackcloth and ashes for that period by retiring into his
penitential cell under a chest of drawers.

When quite a pup, hardly half-grown, he played a trick unaccountable to
me at this day as it was then. Sam had the run of the house, and he
availed himself of it. On going into the breakfast-room, one morning
early, I observed a singular phenomenon in connection with a large,
cold round of beef, which was the _piece de resistance_ on the table.
It was curious to behold a round of cold beef with a tail, which it
wagged, and feathered, and beckoned with, as if to say, "Come, eat me."
The tail was the tail of Sam, whose body was concealed far down in the
interior of the tower of beef, into which he had cut his way with great
perseverance and success. But the puzzle was, how he got there; for
there was no chair within reach of the table, and he was much too small
to have jumped up on it; while the theory of the servant, who
propounded that he must have climbed up by the table-cloth, tooth over
claw, was wild, and simply entitled to the contempt of any person aware
of the difference between dog and cat. There is but one acceptable
theory on the subject,--that he was down in the caverns of the beef,
_tail and all_, before it was brought up-stairs, and so escaped notice.

Early in life, he contracted--from evil association, perhaps--a vulgar
trick of running after carriages and barking at the horses' heels, a
trick of which I in vain tried to break him. Once, when he was about a
year old, I took him up beside me into a high _caleche_, in which we
were going some distance. The moment the horse started, Sam jumped out
to have a bark at his heels, when, to my horror, the wheel of the
vehicle, in which there were three of us, went right over the middle of
his body, cutting him, apparently, in two; but he was up in a second,
and barking at heels and wheels for half a mile before we could pull up
and get him in again. This accident appeared to decide him in the
choice of a profession, for he devoted himself energetically, from that
hour, to the pursuit and baying-at of all manner of wheeled things
propelled by horse-power.

A rat he would never touch, although I introduced him to one before he
was a year old; he manifested neither fear of the vermin, nor surprise
at it, but simply took no interest in it. He had much pleasure in
worrying cats; but that was owing, I fancy, to a sad discomfiture he
once met with from one. Walking through a suburb one day, with Sammy
trotting before me in dreamy mood, to which he was much given, a small,
but remarkably severe cat made a sudden and very fierce dash at him
from a cottage-door, taking him so completely aback, that he tumbled,
head over tail, into a deep, dirty pool of green, stagnant water, such
as is usually to be seen in the pleasure-grounds environing a
suburbo-Hibernian shanty. His appearance, on emerging from that
cesspool, was the reverse of majestic; but the incident gave him such
an idea on the subject of cats, that he always persecuted them
remorselessly from that day; nor did he ever again walk through a
suburb in any other frame of mind than a particularly wide-awake one,
and with his tail up.

These dogs are curiously sensitive about their dignity, and sometimes
do not recover their elasticity of spirits for several days after
having undergone a process of correction. I recollect a singular
instance of this sensitiveness displayed by Sambo, in which he also
manifested a kind of inferential power wonderfully akin to reason.

One morning, a tumult of dogs in the street drew him to the window, out
of which he looked by jumping on a chair, just as a troop of "curs of
low degree" tore past after a rather genteel-looking dog with a kettle
tied to his tail. They whirled rapidly by in a turmoil of dust, and
clink, and cur-dog yelp, but not so rapidly as to prevent Sam from
perceiving the terrible degradation to which a gentleman-dog had been
subjected. The sight had a visible effect on his spirits, for he
immediately became quite depressed as to tail and mind, a condition
which influenced him for a day or two, after which he again appeared
comparatively cheerful, and took his place in society with his
accustomed cautious conviviality. About a month after this, he was seen
coming very slowly along a lane which led up to the back of the
house,--a course hardly ever taken by him, as he was a parlor-dog, and
considered himself entitled to the freedom of the hall-door. Creeping
on in the shadow of the wall, he arrived with a very crest-fallen
aspect at the kitchen-door, where the cause of his ignominious approach
was made manifest to those who were watching him. _He had a kettle tied
to his tail_. Now this animal must surely have argued in his own mind,
that running away with a tin kettle is a sure way of attracting
undesirable notice; also, that proceeding through a public thoroughfare
with such an appendage is injudicious, and likely to result in
trouble. The circumstance of the runaway dog and the tumult after him
had left its impression upon him; and, travelling on his experience, he
rightly judged that an unpleasant affair of the kind might best be
hushed up by quietly making one's way home through back-lanes and the
kitchen-door.

Skye terriers, when young, are apt to have a bad trick of gnawing and
tearing up articles of wearing apparel, particularly slippers, gaiters,
and such other things as are handy to toss up and catch. The fellow I
am writing about, when very young, destroyed sundry items of my
property in that way. He occupied a buffalo-robe in my room, and I
heard him very busy one night about something, but did not pay much
attention to it, as he was often lively at night. In the morning,
however, on looking for a pair of leather gaiters, I recognized the
remains of them, after much investigation, in a mass of pulp, to which
they had been reduced by the little beast as completely as they could
have been by the most experienced boa-constrictor. This habit I soon
broke him of, by chastising him with the remnants of the worried
article, when there were any left of substance sufficient to weave into
a scourge; nor did he ever recur to it when grown up, except once,
evidencing upon that occasion a remarkable instance of hereditary
instinct.

Some fur caps, and other articles of winter wear, had been shaken out
of their summer quarters for the purpose of beating the moths out of
them and ventilating them generally, with a view to which they were
placed upon the sill of an open window. By some means Sam obtained
access to the room, where he was discovered in the act of mauling a
valuable otter-skin cap, which he had selected out of the whole
collection for his particular amusement. This dog had never seen an
otter; but his ancestors were noted for their game qualities in the
pursuit of that animal, and their speciality must have descended to
him.

Eventually Sambo lost all his self-respect. He became discontented and
addicted to low company, dissipating with vile curs whose owners
enjoyed anything but unblemished reputations,--a fact first notified to
me by a clergyman of my acquaintance who knew him well. The worst of
this was, that he wore a collar with my name engraved on it in full;
and it was a long time before I had an opportunity of redeeming that
misused badge. About the very last time I ever saw him, I think, he
came home with one of his eyes gouged out, a split ear, and other marks
but too suggestive of the tavern brawl. I then deprived him of his
collar; soon after which he returned to his unsettled course of life,
and I never saw him again.

The peculiar, otter-like form of these animals, and the buoyancy given
to them by their long, floating hair, endow them with great facility
for swimming; while the small compass into which they will pack in a
canoe or skiff makes them very useful companions to the sportsman whose
propensities are for paddling about "in the melancholy marshes." I made
an excellent retriever of one of mine by carrying in my pocket a
stuffed snipe, which I would make her hunt up and fetch out of the
weeds into which I had thrown it. She would go back half a mile and
fetch this, when I had hidden it ever so cunningly in a thicket by the
way-side. I also taught her to dive, by making her, while young, fetch
up a little bag of shot from the bottom of a bathtub in my room. By
throwing this into deeper water, gradually, she would soon go down to a
great depth for it. A charge of shot, tied up in a piece of white
kid-glove, with a "neck" left to hold on by, is a good object for the
purpose, as it is readily seen in deep water, and teaches the animal,
besides, to nip gingerly,--a valuable qualification in a retriever. I
remember one of these dogs fetching up from a considerable depth the
watch of a friend of mine, which had slipped out of his pocket into a
clear, still bay, over which he was loitering in his canoe.

From times unrecorded until about twenty years ago, the Skye terrier
awaited confidently his summons to the sphere of rank and fashion.
About that time, the day, which, as the proverb figuratively informs
us, it falls to the lot of each individual of the canine race to enjoy,
began to shine out brightly for the dog of Skye, the first rays of it
that reached him being reflected from no less a luminary than the Crown
of Great Britain; for it was among the Scottish fancies of England's
Queen to adopt as a prime favorite this hitherto obscure quadruped.
Reckoned until that time--if anybody took the trouble of computing him
at all--as one of the ugliest of his race, he at once found himself
invested with all the attributes of a canine Adonis,--a very Admirable
Crichton of dogs,--perfect in intellect, face, figure, and the Hyperion
luxuriance of his copious mane and tail. In our youth, we knew--and
hated--a small, unmitigated snob of a dog called the Pug, a kind of
work-basket bull-dog, diminutive in size, dyspeptic in temper,
disagreeable to contemplate, and distressing to be obliged to admire.
One of the missions in society of Skye Terrier--who, when going before
a high wind, bears no unapt resemblance to a mop or a wisp of tow--was
to mop up Pug, and polish him off the hearth-rug of Fashion; a mission
which he appears to have at least partially accomplished. For now the
black muzzle of Pug is but seldom to be seen protruded from
carriage-window, biding his time for a snap at the first kid-gloved
finger that wags within range of his overlapping tusks in waving
salutation to his dowager mistress,--for, of the dowagers, above all,
he was one of the chronic calamities. Oftener, now, are the well-combed
whiskers and moustaches of Skye Dog to be recognized, dropping over the
drawing-room window-sill, or framed, like a portrait by Landseer, in
the panelled sash of the barouche, out of which he gazes pensively with
the impressive speculation of the true _flaneur_;--yea, for as men of
fashion are, so are their dogs; and so also of the fighting butcher,
who ever has his counterpart in the fighting bull-dog that glowers from
his gory stall.

This exalted value of Skye Dog, in a commercial point of view, has, of
course, given rise to the manufacture of a spurious article; whence it
comes, that, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, the animal palmed
off on the unsophisticated as genuine has nothing of the real stuff in
his constitution, but is simply a shallow imitation, compounded
according to prescription,--one part common cur-terrier to two parts
insignificant French poodle. And so I take leave of the Skye terrier
with a _caveat emptor_ to the purchaser who does not want to be sold
while he buys.

The sense of humor must surely exist in individual dogs; otherwise it
would puzzle me to account for the singular practical jokes played off
by a water-spaniel once possessed by me. This individual, whose name
was Muff, was a rather small-sized one, of the pure Kentish blood;
liver-colored, with a white ring on his neck, and white paws;
close-curled, wicked-eyed, deep-chested, and remarkably powerful for
his size. Professionally a retriever,--and one of great promise,
although never fully tested with the gun,--his leisure hours, which
included every one in the twenty-four, were passed in the invention and
perpetration of curiously regulated mischiefs, with all of which he
took pains to combine an element of the ludicrous. His great spree was
to run amuck into a flock of small children coming out of school. If
there was a dirty crossing hard by, over which they had to pass, he
would wait until they had got half-way, and then, going through them
like a rocket, would chuck them down into the mud, right and left, as
he sped, keeping straight on in his career until far beyond range of
pedagogue's rod. His trick of making a sudden rush at the heels of
unsuspecting persons--and he invariably selected the right sort for his
purpose--might often have got me into ugly scrapes, but for the tact
with which he invariably ignored his master on such occasions. If
pursued, he never came near me for protection, but fled wildly on,
assuming the character of a dog "on the loose," belonging to nobody in
particular, and quite able to take care of himself. He had a decided
objection to street industrials in general, including Italian
organ-grinders and image-sellers. Once I saw him crouching stealthily
after one of the latter, who was passing through an open square with a
tray of casts upon his head; and before I could get up a whistle or
call him off by name, he had darted like a javelin at the legs of the
refugee, startling him so much out of the perpendicular that the
superstructure of plastic art came to the ground with a crash,
top-dressing the sterile soil of the Campus Martius with a coat of
manufactured plaster of Paris. Marius, blubbering over the shattered
chimney-stacks of Carthage, could not have displayed a more touching
classical spectacle than did that modern Roman lamenting to and fro
among the fragments of his collapsed martyrs and ruined saints; nor
were his pangs fully assuaged even by the application of the universal
panacea to an amount more than double the value of his lost wares.

A great difficulty in training this dog was to bring him "to heel,"--a
still greater one to keep him there when he came. If thrashed into his
proper place in his master's wake, he always resented the indignity by
biting him pretty severely in the legs with a savage whimper. This he
invariably did on first leaving the house with me, sometimes nipping me
so severely, after we had gone a short distance, that I have hesitated
whether to go back for a pistol to shoot him, or forward for a
pennyworth of biscuit to buy him off. When told to "hie away," the
extravagance of his joy knew no bounds. He would have been as
invaluable to a tailor as was to the Parisian _decrotteur_ the poodle
instructed by him to sully with his paws the shoes of the passengers;
for, in the exuberance of his gladness, he but too often rent
insufferably the vestments of the hapless pedestrians in his line of
fire. Sometimes he would turn his assaults upon me, and, springing
suddenly at my "wide-awake," take it from my head, trailing it wildly
away through the mud, and dropping it in some place where it would be
difficult to get at it without wading. Then I would have to conciliate
him to fetch it,--a favor not to be obtained without much stratagem and
diplomacy.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20