334 THIEVING DOGS AND HORSES 



treating its master as if he was a person whom it really 

 was not respectable to know. While the spaniel was 

 thus poking round the shop with its eyes apparently 

 turned in another direction, the young man was turning 

 over some articles at the counter. Suddenly he glanced 

 at the dog, touching, as if without thinking, a small 

 parcel that lay there. Soon after he left the shop. 



The dog, who from first to last had given no sign that 

 it and its master knew each other, sat down peacefully at 

 the door, in a position where it could see all that was going 

 on inside. At length the shopkeeper went for a moment 

 to an inner room to fetch something he wanted. In an 

 instant the spaniel had placed its fore-paws on the 

 counter, seized the parcel, and crept out noiselessly to 

 rejoin its master, bearing the stolen property trium- 

 phantly in its mouth. 



"We are not told whether in the long run the young 

 man was ever caused any serious trouble by this 

 magpie of a dog ; but a gentleman who became famous 

 as a lawyer at the end of the eighteenth century very 

 nearly fell a victim to the too faithful memory of his 



horse. 



In the days of his youth, somewhere between 1750 

 and 1760, the journey between Edinburgh and London 

 was made on horseback. If a man was rich enough he 

 hired horses to meet him and his servant at certain 

 places on the road, but if he was poor, he bought a horse 

 at the beginning of his journey, and sold him for what he 

 could get at the end of it. 



Now this gentleman had been brought up in the 

 country, and nobody was a better judge of a horse, so 

 when the business which had brought him to London was 

 finished, he set out for Smithfield, where the great horse 

 market then was, to buy a mount for his return journey 

 next day. He instantly picked out a handsome creature 

 with a beautiful head, and stopped to look at it, though he 

 felt, with a sigh, that the sum asked would be certain to 



