388 Village Sketches : [Ocr, 
the world; mud is turned into dust; rivers have retreated to their 
proper limits ; farmers have left off grumbling ; and we are about to 
take a walk, as usual, as far as the Shaw, a pretty wood about a mile off. 
But one of our companions being a stranger to the gentle reader, we 
must do him the honour of an introduction. 
Dogs, when they are sure of having their own way, have sometimes 
ways as odd as those of the unfurred, unfeathered animals, who walk on 
two legs, and talk, and are called rational. My beautiful white grey- 
hound, Mayflower, for instance, is as whimsical as the finest lady m the 
land. Amongst her other fancies, she has taken a violent affection for a 
most hideous stray dog, who made his appearance here about six months 
ago, and contrived to pick up a living in the village, one can hardly tell 
how. Now appealing to the charity of old Rachael Strong, the laun- 
dress—a dog-lover by profession ; now winning a meal from the light- 
footed and open-hearted lasses at the Rose ; now standing on his hind- 
legs, to extort by sheer beggary a scanty morsel from some pair of 
“ drowthy cronies,” or solitary drover, discussing his dinner or supper 
on the alehouse-bench ; now catching a mouthful, flung to him in pure 
contempt by some scornful gentleman of the shoulder-knot, mounted on 
his throne, the coach-box, whose notice he had attracted by dint of ugli- 
ness ; now sharing the commons of Master Keep the shoemaker’s pigs ; 
now succeeding to the reversion of the well-gnawed bone of Master 
Brow the shopkeeper’s fierce house-dog ; now filching the skim-milk of 
Dame Wheeler’s cat :—spit at by the cat ; worried by the mastiff ; chased 
by the pigs ; screamed at by the dame; stormed at by the shoemaker ; 
flogged by the shopkeeper ; teased by all the children, and scouted by all 
the animals of the parish ;—but yet living through his griefs, and bearing 
them patiently, “ for sufferance is the badge of all his tribe;”——and even 
seeming to find, in an occasional full meal, or a gleam of sunshine, or a 
whisp of dry straw on which to repose his sorry carcass, some comfort in 
his disconsolate condition. 
In this plight was he found by May, the most high-blooded and aristo- 
cratic of greyhounds ; and from this plight did May rescue him ;—invited 
him into her territory, the stable ; resisted all attempts to turn him out; 
reinstated him there, in spite of maid, and boy, and mistress, and master ; 
wore out every body’s opposition, by the activity of her protection, and 
the pertinacity of her self-will ; made him sharer of her bed and her 
mess ; and, finally, established him as one of the family as firmly as 
herself. 
_. Dash—for he has even won himself a name amongst us, before he was 
anonymous—Dash is a sort of a kind of a spaniel ; at least there is in his 
mongrel composition some sign of that beautiful race. Besides his ugli- 
ness, which is of the worst sort—that is to say, the shabbiest—he has a 
limp on one leg that gives a peculiarly one-sided awkwardness to his 
gait; but, independently of his great merit in being May’s pet, he has 
other merits which serve to account for that phenomenon—being, beyond 
‘all comparison the most faithful, attached, and affectionate animal that I 
have ever known ; and that is saying much. He seems to think it 
necessary to atone for his ugliness by extra.good conduct, and does so 
dance on his lame leg, and so wag his scrubby tail, that it does any one 
who has a taste for happiness good to look at him—so that he may now 
be said to stand on his own footing. We are all rather ashamed of him — 
when strangers come in the way, and think it necessary to explain that — 
