_By_ JOHN BROWN, M. D.
Four and thirty years ago, Bob Ainslie and I were coming up Infirmary
street from the high school, our heads together, and our arms
intertwisted, as only lovers and boys know how or why.
When we got to the top of the street, and turned north, we espied a
crowd at the Tron-church. "A dog fight!" shouted Bob, and was off; and
so was I, both of us all but praying that it might not be over before we
got up! And is not this boy nature! and human nature too? and don't we
all wish a house on fire not to be out before we see it? Dogs like
fighting; old Isaac says they "delight" in it, and for the best of all
reasons; and boys are not cruel because they like to see the fight. They
see three of the great cardinal virtues of dog or man--courage,
endurance, and skill--in intense action. This is very different from a
love of making dogs fight, and enjoying, and aggravating, and making
gain by their pluck. A boy--be he ever so fond himself of fighting, if
he be a good boy, hates and despises all this, but he would have run off
with Bob and me fast enough; it is a natural, and a not wicked, interest
that all boys and men have in witnessing intense energy in action.
Does any curious and finely-ignorant woman wish to know how Bob's eye at
a glance announced a dog fight to his brain? He did not, he could not
see the dogs fighting; it was a flash of an inference, a 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
downward and inward, 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.
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 observes the buck, but with more
urgency; whereupon 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 young pastoral giant stalks off with Yarrow in his arms--comforting
him.
But the bull-terrier's blood is up, and his soul unsatisfied; he grips
the first dog he meets, and discovering she is not a dog, in Homeric
phrase, he makes a brief sort of _amende_,[101-1] and is off. The boys,
with Bob and me at their head, are after him; down Niddry street he
goes, bent on mischief; up the Cowgate like an arrow--Bob and I, and our
small men, panting behind.
There, under the single arch of the South bridge is a huge mastiff,
sauntering down the middle of the causeway, as if with his hands in his
pockets; he is old, gray, brindled, as big as a little Highland bull,
and has the Shakespearian dewlaps shaking as he goes.
The Chicken makes straight at him, and fastens on his throat. To our
astonishment, the great creature does nothing but stand still, holds
himself up, and roar--yes, roar; a long, serious, remonstrative roar.
How is this? Bob and I are up to them. _He is muzzled!_ The bailies had
proclaimed a general muzzling, and his master, studying strength and
economy mainly, had encompassed his huge jaws in a homemade apparatus,
constructed out of the leather of some ancient breechin. His mouth was
open as far as it could; his lips curled up in rage--a sort of terrible
grin; his teeth gleaming, ready, from out of the darkness; the strap
across his mouth tense as a bow string; his whole frame stiff with
indignation and surprise; his roar asking us all round, "Did you ever
see the like of this?"
He looked a statue of anger and astonishment, done in Aberdeen granite.
We soon had a crowd; the Chicken held on. "A knife!" cried Bob; and a
cobbler gave him his knife; you know the kind of knife, worn away
obliquely to a point, and always keen. I put its edge to the tense
leather; it ran before it; and then!--one sudden jerk of that enormous
head, a sort of dirty mist about his mouth, no noise, and the bright and
fierce little fellow is dropped, limp, and dead. A solemn pause; this
was more than any of us had bargained for. I turned the little fellow
over, and saw he was quite dead; the mastiff had taken him by the small
of the back, like a rat, and broken it.
He looked down at his victim appeased, ashamed and amazed; snuffed him
all over, stared at him, and taking a sudden thought, turned round and
trotted off.