rapid
induction. The crowd round a couple of dogs fighting is a crowd
masculine mainly, with an occasional active, compassionate woman,
fluttering wildly round the outside, and using her tongue and her hands
freely upon the men, as so many "brutes"; it is a crowd annular,
compact, and mobile; a crowd centripetal, having its eyes and its heads
all bent downwards and inwards, to one common focus.

Well, Bob and I are up, and find it is not over: a small thoroughbred,
white Bull Terrier, is busy throttling a large shepherd's dog,
unaccustomed to war, but not to be trifled with. They are hard at it;
the scientific little fellow doing his work in great style, his pastoral
enemy fighting wildly, but with the sharpest of teeth and a great
courage. Science and breeding, however, soon had their own; the Game
Chicken, as the premature Bob called him, working his way up, took his
final grip of poor Yarrow's throat,--and he lay gasping and done for.
His master, a brown, handsome, big young shepherd from Tweedsmuir, would
have liked to have knocked down any man, would "drink up Esil,[*] or eat
a crocodile," for that part, if he had a chance: it was no use kicking
the little dog; that would only make him hold the closer. Many were the
means shouted out in mouthfuls, of the best possible ways of ending it.
"Water!" but there was none near, and many cried for it who might have
got it from the well at Blackfriars Wynd. "Bite the tail!" and a large,
vague, benevolent, middle-aged man, more desirous than wise, with some
struggle got the bushy end of _Yarrow's_ tail into his ample mouth, and
bit it with all his might. This was more than enough for the
much-enduring, much-perspiring shepherd, who, with a gleam of joy over
his broad visage, delivered a terrific facer upon our large, vague,
benevolent, middle-aged friend,--who went down like a shot.

[* Esil, "vinegar" (_Hamlet_, V, I, 299).]

Still the Chicken holds; death not far off. "Snuff! a pinch of snuff!"
observed a calm, highly-dressed young buck, with an eye-glass in his
eye. "Snuff, indeed!" growled the angry crowd, affronted and glaring.
"Snuff! a pinch of snuff!" again observed the buck, but with more
urgency; whereon were produced several open boxes, and from a mull which
may have been at Culloden, he took a pinch, knelt down, and presented it
to the nose of the Chicken. The laws of physiology and of snuff take
their course; the Chicken sneezes, and Yarrow is free!

The you