The Field Spaniel 237 



which beat him. Benedict was never beaten that we can now recall, but 

 he was weak in muzzle and it was his body properties, his good front and 

 his beautiful coat that put him before his opponents. Moore's Dash was 

 better in head when they met at New York in 1881, but nowhere else. 

 None of these dogs did any good for the breed, however, for there was 

 nothing to mate them with except the cocker spaniels, and there was no 

 sound foundation in their breeding. 



What interfered at that time, and has always interfered, with the 

 popularity of the field spaniel was the preference for the cocker, which 

 was then entering upon the Obo regime. The shooting man has never 

 found much use for the field spaniel, and he who simply wants a dog suited 

 to his uneducated taste for fancy points will in the vast majority of cases 

 prefer the cocker to any other variety of spaniel. Just as the fancy for 

 the breed seemed dying out, Mr. E. M. Oldham took hold of it, and by 

 judicious importations improved the classes very much. Many of these 

 came from the Newton Abbot kennels, and he had so many of them that 

 he subsequently took the name and still uses it as his prefix. What in 

 his opinion was the best of the many good dogs he owned we never asked, 

 but ours is that Glencairn, not from the Jacobs kennel, was the one with 

 the greater claim to that position. Not alone was he good individually, 

 but the few opportunities he had to be bred from (only two, we believe, 

 owing to his untimely death), showed more good puppies than was the 

 case from any dog of the time, or possibly any field spaniel we have ever 

 had. He was much inbred, being by a dog called Bracken, by Solus out 

 of Beverley Bess, by Beau out of Nell; Solus by Bachelor out of Salus. 

 His dam was Belle, a full sister to Bracken. We do not consider the photo- 

 graph of Glencairn a good one, and it does the dog no credit. 



Mr. Oldham then associated himself with Mr. Willey, who was more 

 intimately connected with cockers at that time, and the partnership was 

 productive of good results during the brief time it lasted. Mr. W. T. 

 Payne, also a cocker man, interested himself in field spaniels to a slight 

 extent, and perhaps there was no time when competition was better than 

 about 1890. In that year at New York the spaniel entry was four Irish 

 water spaniels, eight Clumbers, twenty-one field spaniels and eighty-seven 

 cocker spaniels. We are speaking of actual dogs, and this total of 120 

 dogs were shov^m in nineteen classes, an average of six and a third per 

 class. This year, 1905, the record showed two Irish, seven Clumber, 



