138 Short Comrmmications : — 



whisker and eyebrow, and his unceasing bark, made him 

 noticeable by day and night. I never was given to such pas- 

 times, but I am told he would dive after a waterfowl, and 

 draw a badger; accomplishments some years since in high 

 odour with puppies at the Universities ; now, I hope, in these 

 reforming days, abandoned for more philosophical and classical 

 pursuits. Crib, therefore, did not want courage. He was 

 Cerberus from that time till his death, in 1831, at my resi- 

 dence in Suffolk, and during those ten years became cele- 

 brated as a guardian by night, a companion by day, an enemy 

 of poachers, the friend of cats, and, like J. D.'s Toby, a 

 mighty connoisseur in gooseberries. I have no time here to 

 tell all his adventures with a monkey and a snake, which I 

 kept with him as playmates ; but I may add that Toby, with 

 all his " taste" and " well-bred" enjoyment, does not appear 

 to have arrived at Mr. Crib's state of renown. I found him, 

 one day, in the garden, performing Toby's feat of gooseberry- 

 crushing ; thereby discovering the depredator, whom we had 

 long unjustly considered a two-legged dog. In his heedless- 

 ness, he swallowed a berry, in which was a wasp. The wasp 

 stung his throat; and the agony, to judge by his grimaces, 

 must have been intense. From that hour he became the 

 mortal enemy of the whole race of wasps, and his skill in 

 destroying them was remarkable. Baring his teeth by the 

 withdrawal of his lips (V. 386.)j he would wait under his 

 favourite bushes till the wasps appeared, and then, snapping 

 at them, he contrived to kill them without injury to himself. 

 I have seen dozens of those marauders mingled with the 

 gooseberry husks under the bushes, but I never recollect an 

 instance of their doing their destroyer an injury after the first 

 insult. The dog never forgot the circumstance ; a wasp ever 

 after became an object of pursuit with him. This, however, 

 was not all : amongst other things. Crib, like his namesake of 

 the ring, was a tippler as well as boxer ; and nothing de- 

 lighted him so much as a saucerful of warm elderberry wine, 

 which he regularly partook at Christmas with the family. 

 I have seen him, more than once, *' pretty considerably decent 

 tipsy," as they say in America ; but justice compels me to say 

 that this was his only failing: a more moral dog, in every 

 other respect, never lived, and one more regretted never died. 

 The day I left my native place, he laid himself down at the 

 foot of my chair, burst a blood-vessel, and expired. He sleeps 

 in his quiet grave, under the shadow of one of the most 

 splendid oaks in all Suffolk; and his epitaph might put to 

 the blush many, perhaps, who may call its writer, for this 



