d never repeated that exploit.

I never saw in any other dog the sudden transition from discretion, not
to say abject cowardice, to blazing and permanent valor. From his
earliest years he showed a general meanness of blood, inherited from
many generations of starved, bekicked, and down-trodden forefathers and
mothers, resulting in a condition of intense abjectness in all matters
of personal fear; anybody, even a beggar, by a _gowl_ and a threat of
eye, could send him off howling by anticipation, with that mighty tail
between his legs. But it was not always so to be, and I had the
privilege of seeing courage, reasonable, absolute, and for life, spring
up in Toby at once, as did Athene from the skull of Jove. It happened
thus:--

Toby was in the way of hiding his culinary bones in the small gardens
before his own and the neighboring doors. Mr. Scrymgeour, two doors off,
a bulky, choleric, red-haired, red-faced man--_torvo vultu_--was, by the
law of contrast, a great cultivator of flowers, and he had often scowled
Toby into all but non-existence by a stamp of his foot and a glare of
his eye. One day his gate being open, in walks Toby with a huge bone,
and making a hole where Scrymgeour had two minutes before been planting
some precious slip, the name of which on paper and on a stick Toby made
very light of, substituted his bone, and was engaged covering it, or
thinking he was covering it up with his shovelling nose (a very odd
relic of paradise in the dog), when S. spied him through the inner glass
door, and was out upon him like the Assyrian, with a terrible _gowl_. I
watched them. Instantly Toby made straight at him with a roar too, and
an eye more torve than Scrymgeour's, who, retreating without reserve,
fell prostrate, there is reason to believe, in his own lobby. Toby
contented himself with proclaiming his victory at the door, and
returning finished his bone-planting at his leisure; the enemy, who had
scuttled behind the glass-door, glaring at him.

From this moment Toby was an altered dog. Pluck at first sight was lord
of all; from that time dated his first tremendous deliverance of tail
against the door, which we called "come listen to my tail." That very
evening he paid a visit to Leo, next door's dog, a big, tyrannical bully
and coward, which its master thought a Newfoundland, but whose pedigree
we knew better; this brute continued the same system of chronic
extermination which was interrupted at Lochend,--havin