THE COACH-DOG. OR DALMATIAN. 
729 
discovered that not one lamb of the whole flock was want¬ 
ing ! How he had got all the divisions collected in the dark 
is beyond my comprehension. The charge was left entirely 
to himself, from midnight until the rising sun ; and if ail 
the shepherds in the forest had been there to have assisted 
him, they could not have effected it with greater propriety 
All that I can further say is, that I never felt so grateful to 
any creature under the sun as I did to my honest Sirrah 
that morning.” 
THE COACH-DOG, OR DALMATIAN. 
This dog, once so common an attendant upon gentlemen s 
carriages, has now become exceedingly scarce. Some authors 
have confounded him with the Danish dog. Buffon and 
others imagine him to be the harrier of Bengal; but his 
native country is Dalmatia, a mountainous district of Euro¬ 
pean Turkey. 
In Britain the Dalmatian has only been used for orna¬ 
ment, while in Italy he was long the harrier of that coun¬ 
try, and used for upwards of two centuries as a dog of the 
chase. He has also been used as a pointer, for which he has 
been found even more adapted than for hunting; and many 
instances have occurred where he has turned out very 
stanch. His fonn is handsome, as if a medium between the 
foxhound and pointer, his head, however, is more acute than 
that of the latter, and his ears fully longer; his general 
colour is white, and his entire skin covered with small black 
or reddish-brown spots. The pure breed has tanned cheeks 
and black ears. In size, he is considerably smaller than the 
Danish dog. A barbarous opinion prevailed at one time in 
this country, that the Dalmatian looked better with his ears 
cropped; and we remember the time when hardly one that 
we met with but had been denuded of those elegant append 
