en."]

BY DR. JOHN BROWN (1810-1882)

[_Setting_. Dr. Brown was once driving with a friend through a crowded
section of Edinburgh when he stopped in the middle of a sentence,
seeming to be surprised at something behind the carriage. "Is it some
one you know?" the friend asked. "No," was the reply, "it's a dog I
_don't_ know." Needless to say that "Rab and his Friends" is an
Edinburgh story. The time is about 1824-1830. In the Scotch dialect
"weel a weel" means "all right"; "till" means "to"; "I'se" means "I
shall"; "he's" means "he shall"; "ower clean to beil" means "too clean
to suppurate"; "fremyt" means "strange"; "a' the lave" means "all the
rest"; "in the treviss wi' the mear" means "in the stall with the mare."

_Plot_. From Aesop's Fables to Kipling's Jungle Books literature is full
of animal stories. But there is no dog story better told than this and
none that appeals more to our deeper sympathies. It is more of a
character sketch than a short story, the incidents and characters being
bound together by a common relation to Rab. From his leisurely first
appearance in the story, "a huge mastiff, sauntering down the middle of
the causeway, as if with his hands in his pockets," to the unanswerable
last question--"His teeth and his friends gone, why should he keep the
peace, and be civil?"--we follow Rab's pathetic career with the growing
conviction that "his like was na atween this and Thornhill," however
distant Thornhill may have been. Character sketches are apt to be
uninteresting because there is usually too little action and too much
description. The adjectives tend to smother the verbs. "They have," said
Hawthorne of his "Twice-Told Tales," "the pale tint of flowers that
blossomed in too retired a shade,--the coolness of a meditative habit,
which diffuses itself through the feeling and observation of every
sketch." But no such charge can be laid at the door of "Rab and his
Friends." The very dumbness of Rab, his mute yearning to help, his brave
and loyal ministries in the hospital, doubly affecting because wordless
and impotent, lend an appeal to this sketch that few sketches of men and
women can be said to have.

_Characters_. In a later sketch called "Our Dogs" Dr. Brown tells how
Rab became the property of James and Ailie. He had been terrifying
everybody at Macbie Hill and his owner ordered him to be hanged. As Rab
was getting the better of the contest, his owner commanded that he be
shot. But Ailie