moment not only recall my pain and terror--I have no doubt I was to
blame--but also her face; and were I allowed to search among the shades
in the cynic Elysian fields, I could pick her out still. All my life I
have been familiar with these faithful creatures, making friends of
them, and speaking to them; and the only time I ever addressed the
public, about a year after being bitten, was at the farm of Kirklaw
Hill, near Biggar, when the text, given out from an empty cart in which
the ploughmen had placed me, was "Jacob's dog," and my entire sermon was
as follows:--"Some say that Jacob had a black dog (the _o_ very long),
and some say that Jacob had a white dog, but _I_ (imagine the
presumption of four years!) say Jacob had a brown dog, and a brown dog
it shall be."

I had many intimacies from this time onwards--Bawtie, of the inn;
Keeper, the carrier's bull-terrier; Tiger, a huge tawny mastiff from
Edinburgh, which I think must have been an uncle of Rab's; all the sheep
dogs at Callands--Spring, Mavis, Yarrow, Swallow, Cheviot, etc.; but it
was not till I was at college, and my brother at the High School, that
we possessed a dog.

TOBY

Was the most utterly shabby, vulgar, mean-looking cur I ever beheld: in
one word, _a tyke_. He had not one good feature except his teeth and
eyes, and his bark, if that can be called a feature. He was not ugly
enough to be interesting; his color black and white, his shape leggy and
clumsy; altogether what Sydney Smith would have called an
extraordinarily ordinary dog; and, as I have said, not even greatly
ugly, or, as the Aberdonians have it, _bonnie wi' ill-fauredness_. My
brother William found him the centre of attraction to a multitude of
small blackguards who were drowning him slowly in Lochend Loch, doing
their best to lengthen out the process, and secure the greatest amount
of fun with the nearest approach to death. Even then Toby showed his
great intellect by pretending to be dead, and thus gaining time and an
inspiration. William bought him for twopence, and as he had it not, the
boys accompanied him to Pilrig Street, when I happened to meet him, and
giving the twopence to the biggest boy, had the satisfaction of seeing a
general engagement of much severity, during which the twopence
disappeared; one penny going off with a very small and swift boy, and
the other vanishing hopelessly into the grating of a drain.

Toby was for weeks in the house unbeknown to any one but ours