e whole parish, and the honour of all
its inhabitants, male and female, was felt to be staked on the
issue--while at intervals was heard the harsh hoarse voice of the
carrier and his compeers, cursing and swearing in triumph in a
many-oathed language peculiar to the race that drive the broad-wheeled
waggons with the high canvass roofs, as the might of Teeger prevailed,
and the indomitable Fro seemed to be on his last legs beneath a grip of
the jugular, and then stretched motionless and passive--in defeat or
death. A mere _ruse_ to recover wind. Like unshorn Sampson starting from
his sleep, and snapping like fired flax the vain bands of the
Philistines, Fro whammled Teeger off, and twisting round his head in
spite of the grip on the jugular, the skin stretching and giving way in
a ghastly but unfelt wound, he suddenly seized with all his tusks his
antagonist's eye, and bit it clean out of the socket. A yowl of
unendurable pain--spouting of blood--sickness--swooning--tumbling
over--and death. His last fight is over! His remaining eye glazed--his
protruded tongue bitten in anguish by his own grinding teeth--his massy
hind-legs stretched out with a kick like a horse--his short tail
stiffens--he is laid out a grim corpse--flung into a cart tied behind
the waggon--and off to the tanyard.

No shouts of victory--but stern, sullen, half-ashamed silence--as of
guilty things after the perpetration of a misdeed. Still glaring
savagely, ere yet the wrath of fight has subsided in his heart, and
going and returning to the bloody place, uncertain whether or not his
enemy were about to return, Fro finally lies down at some distance, and
with bloody flews keeps licking his bloody legs, and with long darting
tongue cleansing the mire from his neck, breast, side, and back--a
sanguinary spectacle! He seems almost insensible to our caresses, and
there is something almost like upbraiding in his victorious eyes. Now
that his veins are cooling, he begins to feel the pain of his
wounds--many on, and close to vital parts. Most agonising of all--all
his four shanks are tusk-pierced, and, in less than ten minutes, he
limps away to his kennel, lame as if riddled by shot--

"Heu quantum mutatus ab illo
Hectore!"

gore-besmeared and dirt-draggled--an hour ago serenely bright as the
lily in June, or the April snow. The huge waggon moves away out of the
clachan without its master, who, ferocious from the death of the other
brute he loved, da