HEROES OF THE LEASH 213 



answered mine host, with an angry scowl ; ' and his soul 

 kens this day whether the hare of Balchristy got fair play 

 or not.'" 



North of the Tweed, too, the late Mr Campbell, an 

 Ayrshire laird, famous for a breed of greyhounds by his 

 dog Scotland Yet, was as great an enthusiast as Lord 

 Orford. He had a mania for giving his dogs out-of-the- 

 way names, fearing similar ones would accidentally be 

 bestowed on inferior animals in England. This feeling 

 first began when a red dog of Mr Campbell's named 

 Cromwell, the winner of the Biggar (Open) Cup of 64 

 dogs in 1853, afterwards got mixed in the entries with an 

 English dog of the same name, and became more intensified 

 on his finding that his favourite puppy, Scotland Yet, was 

 often mistaken for Mr Sharpe's Scotland Yet that ran for 

 the Ridgway Club Cup. After that he would have no 

 more " common names for his dowgs," hence Coomerango, 

 of which Boomerang was the natural sequence. And so 

 he continued until he reached Canaradzo, Carabradzo, and 

 Cohooxardo, which he considered his masterpieces of nomen- 

 clature ; and he used to declare his dogs had no luck unless 

 he named them. It was, however, his son — known to the 

 coursing world as " Jock o' Dalgig " — who first introduced 

 the sport to the family in 1841, when Mr M'Turk gave 

 him a puppy. But the Laird o' Dalgig never took any 

 notice of the bitch till six years afterwards, when he took a 

 violent fancy to her, and so learnt to love coursing as no 

 one else in his day did. His maiden win was a farmers' 

 stake at Closeburn — five shillings entrance, and thirty 

 runners. This Dido won, and repeated her victory at a 

 Closeburn public meeting next year. Of all the greyhounds 

 he ever bred, Coodareena was his favourite ; yet, much as 

 he loved her, he would sometimes make her run trials in 

 one day against the whole team, being " deaf as Ailsa Craig " 

 to all his son Jock's expostulations. He evidently thought 

 her a sort of steam-engine, " cast at Hawke's and fitted at 

 Stephenson's " — as the Newcastle " hinnies " used to say of 

 the great oarsman Bob Chambers — or he would never have 

 tried her so hard. 



The Laird of Dalgig was famed through Nithsdale and 



