80 DOGS I HAVE KNOWN 



large sort of retriever that a friend of mine had. 

 He asked me to come and see a dog that had been 

 given him, as it was a "very odd sort of beast," and so 

 it was. It had the most curious coat I ever saw 

 on a dog — very long and iron-grey, with black mark- 

 ings, a huge bushy tail, so big and so long that it 

 gave one the idea that the dog's hind legs were in 

 the wrong place, and, instead of being at the ex- 

 tremity of its body, were put on somewhere about 

 the middle of its stomach. To add to everything, 

 the dog squinted, a thing I never heard of or saw in 

 any other dog before or since. It was not that one 

 of the eyes was blind and did not move properly, 

 but the eyes actually crossed one another ; his head, 

 too, was the shape of a solid parallelogram, and very 

 narrow between the ears. The dog was fastened to 

 a kennel, and was walking backwards and forwards 

 in front of it, very much in the way a caged hyena 

 does. On being loosed, it bundled off in a clumsy 

 gallop, and soon ran right into a barrow that had been 

 left on one of the paths. On being brought up 

 by this obstacle, instead of jumping over it, as 

 any other dog would have done, he moved round 

 it, and when he found his head clear, galloped 

 off again on the same straight line, which this 

 time landed him in a laurel bush, through which 

 he scrambled, and again went on in the same 



