26 THE STOR Y OF THE JERSE Y HERD 



creatures have inherited from generations of kind treat- 

 ment. As each strolled into the sale-ring, it walked 

 up to any spectator who took its fancy, and pushed its 

 muzzle out to be patted, or put its head up to be 

 stroked, with a confidence which scarcely any other 

 breed of domesticated animal would show if suddenly 

 brought into the company of a crowd of unknown 

 human beings. Their eyes were black, their eyelashes 

 long and silky, all their noses were fringed with a 

 narrow silver edging of satin hair, and their skin, where 

 it showed elsewhere, was covered with a yellow bloom, 

 of the correct * butter-pat ' tint, which suffused the very 

 hollows of their high-bred ears. 



The story of the Jersey herd should have belonged 

 to an earlier age. They are, as an island race, the 

 modern equivalent of the cattle of the Sun, the earliest 

 of all pedigree herds, which fed on sea-washed 

 Trinacria ; and there is something so contrary to 

 probability in their first beginnings, that it seems to 

 need a setting in legend. Treated as a fact in natural 

 history, it will be allowed that conditions less likely to 

 develop a species to perfection could scarcely be found 

 than those on a small island, eleven and a half miles 

 long and five miles wide, set in a stormy, narrow sea. 



Limited space, exposure to sea gales, and the 

 tendency to interbreed, together with the absence of 

 any surplus of natural food, and the difficulty of 



