2 THE OLD ENGLISH SHEEP DOG 



grim, ill-tempered customer to deal with. His colour 

 also is usually white, with brown markings. 



The Owtchah, or Russian sheep dog, which approxi- 

 mates far more closely to our own breed, is a more 

 compact and squarely built dog, massive in every respect, 

 and fully thirty inches at the shoulder, very big of bone, 

 and wonderfully active for his weight. Some specimens 

 of this breed, but for their long tails, resemble even 

 in colour an enormously exaggerated Old English Sheep 

 Dog in almost every point. 



It may be that, in the remoteness of buried centuries, 

 these varieties had a common ancestral stock, and that 

 the originators of our breed were imported into England 

 at a time when the duties of a sheep dog demanded of 

 him qualities and characteristics no longer necessary in 

 our more peaceful times. 



But this, at the best, is mere guesswork, beyond all 

 possibility of human proof. 



A point of far greater importance, and gratifying in the 

 extreme to every lover of the breed, is the fact that the Old 

 English Sheep Dog of to-day retains, to a quite extra- 

 ordinary degree, the outward semblance of his forbears of 

 a hundred and thirty years ago. For I have in my 

 possession an engraving, executed in 1771 by John 

 Boydell, of a picture by Gainsborough, which depicts a 

 former Duke of Buccleuch with his arms clasped round 

 the neck of an excellent specimen of the breed. The 

 face of the dog, in common with that of his- master, 



