s-sas-katchewan." Being only a dog, Jan failed
not at all in the sympathy he exchanged for Betty's confidence. He just
gently nuzzled her hand, thrusting his nose well up to her coat-cuff,
and showed her the loving devotion in his dark hazel eyes.

XVII

JAN BEFORE THE JUDGES

Eighteen months went by before Dick Vaughan returned to England; and
this period was one of happy and largely uneventful development for Jan,
the son of Finn and Desdemona. (It brought high honors to the Lady
Desdemona, by the way, both as a champion bloodhound and as the dam of
some fame-winning youngsters.) It brought no very marked signs of
advancing age to Finn, for the life the wolfhound led, while admittedly
devoid of any kind of hardship, was sufficiently active in a moderate
way, and very healthy. Jan made no history during this time, beyond the
smooth record of happy days and healthy growth.

"Just for the fun of the thing," he was entered in the "variety" class
at the Brighton dog-show, when twenty months old, and that was certainly
a memorable experience for him. There were bloodhound men at the show
who vowed he would have won a card in their section; and there were
wolfhound breeders who said the same thing of Jan with reference to
their particular division. Be that as it may, Finn's son won general
admiration when led out into the judging ring with the other entrants of
the "variety" class.

The judge was a specially great authority on bulldogs and terriers; but
it was admitted that there was no better or fairer all-round dog judge
in the show, and his experience in the past at hound field trials and
such like events proved him qualified to judge of such an animal as Jan.
Still, his special association with bulldogs and terriers was regarded
as something of a handicap by the exhibitors of other kinds of dogs in
this class, which, as it happened, was an unusually full one.

As Jan had never before been shown and was quite unaccustomed to being
at close quarters with numbers of strange dogs, Betty asked the Master
to take him into the ring for her. (Jan weighed one hundred and
forty-eight pounds now, and a pretty strong arm was required for his
restraint among strangers, the more so as he was quite unaccustomed to
being led.) So Betty and the Mistress secured stools for themselves
outside the ring and the Master led in Jan to a place among no fewer
than twenty-seven other competitors, ranging all the way from a queer
lit