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 régime. 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 shown in nineteen classes, an average of six and a third per 
class. This year, 1905, the record showed two Irish, seven Clumber, 
