oo, that Jan's mistress
missed Dick Vaughan; but according to the Master, the young man was well
employed and by no means wasting his time. And Jan did have at least one
useful lesson in the week following Betty's accident on the Downs; and
it was a lesson which he never entirely forgot.

Jan was busily doing nothing in particular--"mucking about" as the
school-boys elegantly put it--in the little lane which forms a
right-of-way across the Downs, between the Nuthill orchard and the
westernmost of the Upcroft fields. Betty Murdoch was still nursing her
ankle; and, fast asleep in the hall beside her couch, Finn, the
wolfhound, was dreaming of a great kangaroo-hunt in which he and the
dingo bitch Warrigal were engaged in replenishing their Mount Desolation
larder. Suddenly Jan looked up, sniffing, from his idle play, and saw
against the sky-line, where the narrow lane rises sharply toward the
Downs, a gray-clad man in gaiters, with a long ash staff in his hand and
a big sheep-dog of sorts, descending together from the heights.

The man was David Crumplin, the sheep-dealer, and the dog was Grip,
whose reputation, all unknown though it was to Jan, reached from the
Romney marshes to the Solent; even as his sire's had carried weight from
York to the Border. Grip's dam, so the story went, had been a gipsy's
lurcher with Airedale blood in her. If so, his size and weight were
rather surprising; but his militant disposition may, to some extent,
have been explained. At all events, there was no sheep-dog of experience
between Winchelsea and Lewes who would have dreamed of treating Grip
with anything save the most careful respect and deference, since, while
hardly to be called either quarrelsome or aggressive, he was a noted
killer, a most formidable fighter when roused. He was also a past-master
in the driving of sheep, his coat was of the density of several
door-mats, and he had china-blue eyes with plenty of fire in them, but
no tenderness.

These things would, of course, have been ample in the shape of
credentials and introduction for any dog of ripe experience. For puppy
Jan (despite his hundred pounds of weight) they all went for nothing at
all. His salutation was a joyous, if slightly cracked, bark; a sort of--

"Hullo! a stranger! Come on! What larks!"

And he went prancing like a rocking-horse up the lane to meet Grip,
prepared to make a new friend, to romp, or do any other kind of thing
that was not serious. But, as it