198 British Dogs. 



an eminence all day and to watch the movements of thousands of sheep 

 grazing below him, for he will keep all in their proper district ; and when 

 he hears his master' s shrill whistle he will ' go round ' and drive them 

 home." I once read the foregoing balderdash to a Scotch shepherd, 

 which elicited the criticism, "Hoota ! fulebody ; does he think a' the hirsel 

 lie in ae' hollow, and that we drive them a' hame at 'een like kye tae the 

 byre ?" The fact is, the writer borrowed the story from an earlier writer, 

 "John Meyrick," and enlarged and embellished it with the exuberance of 

 his own fancy as a bit of padding ; and that was the sort of intellectual 

 pabulum offered to the inquiring mind on colleys by the " Dogs of the 

 British Islands." 



In the recently issued edition of his work, " Stonehenge" has swept 

 his pages clean of all such trumpery, recognising that the extraordinary 

 intelligence really possessed by the colley needs not the embellishments 

 of Munchausenism, and he has given the best descriptive article on col- 

 leys ever written. Yet still on the subject of colour I have " a crow to 

 pluck " with him, presumptuous as it may be to " beard the lion in his den,' ' 

 as it were, and attack the king of canine writers in his very castle. He says : 

 "A good deal of white is met with in some strains, and sometimes the 

 tan is altogether absent, but, cceteris paribus, a black and tan colour 

 without much white is highly preferred." Now, this gives the impres- 

 sion that the black and tan has some superiority over those with white, 

 which is not the case ; neither, as stated by " Stonehenge," are black and 

 tan colleys the most commonly met with. That such is the case at shows I 

 freely grant, but there a large number owe the colour to the setter cross, 

 although in some cases this may be rather remote ; but in the pastoral dis- 

 tricts of Scotland and the North of England my own observations, con- 

 firmed by reference to numerous friends, convince me that black- white-and- 

 tan colleys are the most numerous, and chacon a son gout ; but cceteris 

 paribus, I say those with a white ring, or almost a ring, round the neck, 

 a white chest, a white end to the tail, and a good broad dash of white down 

 the forehead and face are greatly to be preferred. That black and white 

 colleys have been long recognised, the following advertisement, which 

 appeared in the " Edinburgh Evening Courant " of 20th January, 1806, 

 bears witness : " There was lost in Princess-street, on Saturday, the 

 28th Dec. last, a black and white rough colley or shepherd's dog." 



I do not, however, rest my argument entirely either on my own observa- 



