95 
THE STORY OF GOUGH AND HIS DOG. 
By THE Rev. H. D. RAWNSLEY, M.A. 
WE had been talking about the sagacity of our Cumberland 
collies, ‘‘But there is no tale so touching,” said *my friend, “as the 
story of that Rizpah among dogs, who watched for three months 
her dead master ‘fade away’ in the ‘savage place’ by the Red Tarn, 
on Helvellyn. I have been lately collecting from the Classics, 
from prose writers and poets in many lands, some pictures and 
incidents of dog-life. The ‘Friend of Man’ has nowhere appeared 
so human in its tender kindness, so faithful and affectionate in its 
memory, as in this instance of terrible vigil. 
“The unburied corpse with the lone watcher on the mountain 
has seemed more solemn to my imagination than the graves by 
which so many dogs have hungered till they died. How one 
wishes that some record of that heroic little creature could be 
placed where passers by might see it and ponder.” 
“The thing can be easily done,” I answered. ‘We have but 
to get leave from the Lord of the Manor to erect a cairn upon 
Helvellyn overlooking Striding Edge, and build into it a simple 
slate-stone slab that shall record the fact, and shall serve to remind 
its readers, of the tragedy, and the pathetic incident which so 
touched the hearts of three poets in the memorable year 1805. 
Memorable to Scott for that in the April of that year he gave his 
‘Lay of the Last Minstrel’ to the world; memorable to Wordsworth 
because that he finished in mid-May of that year the poem that 
* Miss Frances Power Cobbe. 
