set aboil, and thou--like Julius Caesar--and
Demetrius Poliorcetes--and Alexander the Great--and many other ancient
and modern kings and heroes--thou wert the slave of thy passions. No
Scipio wert thou with a Spanish captive. Often--in spite of threatening
eye and uplifted thong--uplifted only, for thou went'st unflogged to thy
grave--didst thou disappear for days at a time--as if lost or dead.
Rumours of thee were brought to the kirk by shepherds from the remotest
hills in the parish--most confused and contradictory--but, when
collected and compared, all agreeing in this--that thou wert living, and
lifelike, and life-imparting, and after a season from thy travels to
return; and return thou still didst--wearied often and woe-begone--purpled
thy snow-white curling--and thy broad breast torn, not disfigured, by
honourable wounds. For never yet saw we a fighter like thee. Up on thy
hind-legs in a moment, like a growling Polar monster, with thy fore-paws
round thy foeman's neck, bull-dog, collie, mastiff, or greyhound, and
down with him in a moment, with as much ease as Cass, in the wrestling
ring at Carlisle, would throw a Bagman, and then woe to the throat of
the downfallen, for thy jaws were shark-like as they opened and shut
with their terrific tusks, grinding through skin and sinew to the spine.

Once, and once only--bullied out of all endurance by a half-drunken
carrier--did we consent to let thee engage in a pitched battle with a
mastiff victorious in fifty fights--a famous shanker--and a throttler
beyond all compare. It was indeed a bloody business--now growling along
the glaur of the road--a hairy hurricane--now snorting in the
suffocating ditch--now fair play on the clean and clear crown of the
causey--now rolling over and over through a chance-open white little
gate, into a cottage-garden--now separated by choking them both with a
cord--now brought out again with savage and fiery eyes to the scratch on
a green plat round the signboard-swinging tree in the middle of the
village--auld women in their mutches crying out, "Shame! whare's the
minister?"--young women, with combs in their pretty heads, blinking with
pale and almost weeping faces from low-lintelled doors--children
crowding for sight and safety on the louping-on-stane--and loud cries
ever and anon at each turn and eddy of the fight, of "Well done, Fro!
well done, Fro!--see how he worries his windpipe--well done, Fro!" for
Fro was the delight and glory of th