CHAPTER XXVII.

THE COCKER.

THIS, the smallest of our race of sporting spaniels, is retrograding rather than progressing, and, hardy, cheerful little dog though he be, sportsmen have found that a bigger dog can do his duties better, even to working rough covert, and it is not a general thing for a cocker to retrieve a rabbit or a hare. Indeed, some cockers I have had would not retrieve at all, nor did I blame them, for retrieving is a duty to be performed by a more powerful dog.

The prizes offered for the cocker on the show bench are not of particular value, nor do they carry sufficient honour, to make it worth the while of any one breeding him for such purpose alone, so, as a matter of fact, this once favoured little dog is not growing with the times in the manner a successful concern ought to be. Only the larger exhibitions give him classes of his own, and the prizes then do not, as a rule, go to the genuine article.

The cocker of the olden time I should take to be

the connecting link between the working and the toy spaniels. We have been told that the Blenheims at Marlborough House were excellent dogs to work the coverts for cock and pheasant, and, excepting in colour, there is in reality not much difference in appearance between the older orange and white toys (not as they are to day, with their abnormally short noses) and the liver and white cockers H. B. Chalon drew for Daniel's "Rural Sports" in 1801.

Two of Chalon's little spaniels have just sprung a woodcock, and charming specimens they are, not too low on the leg, nor over-done in the matter of ears, but sprightly little dogs, evidently under 20lb. weight, and of a type we do not find to-day. Many of us lament the growing scarcity of this variety as he was to be found fifty years ago and more. Modern breeders tell us they have provided. us with a better and handsomer animal. It is an open question whether they have done the former, I acknowledge they have done the latter.

Some few years ago I became the possessor of a brace of black cockers, the most beautiful little spaniels imaginable. How they were bred I am not aware. This I do know, that wherever they went they were admired more than any other dogs; not in the show ring-they never appeared there-but in the streets and the country generally. At that time

As

I was shooting a good deal, and had ample opportunity of entering them to game of every kind. kind. sporting dogs they were comparatively useless; for they were noisy, headstrong, not at all careful, and would pass half a dozen rabbits or pheasants whilst they were putting up three or four. My terriers could beat their heads off, and a cross-bred spaniel I had at that time could have outworked a big team of them.

Of course, this must not be taken as an inference that all these modern, extremely pretty black cockers are equally useless; but, from others that I have seen at work, I did not take mine to have been an especially unfortunate brace. The coats of some of them are not adapted to protect the hide of the dog from being pierced by those sharp thorns and prickly brambles that are to be found in every ordinary covert.

Some portions of Wales and Devonshire have produced the old working type of cocker, mostly liver and white in colour, higher on the leg than an ordinary field spaniel, not so long in ears, with a close coat, not too fine, usually inclining to be wavy and curly on the hind quarters, and a head finer in the muzzle than the ordinary spaniel would seem to possess, and with a character of its own.

About twenty years ago Dr. Boulton was exhibit

ing his Rhea, a black specimen which won a great many prizes. She, however, had little or no strain of the cocker in her, and what excellence she possessed was imparted from the same blood that ran in the pedigree of Bullock's Nellie and other celebrities of her day.

Perhaps the best class of cockers I have ever seen was benched at Manchester in 1892. There were fourteen of them, in many types; but amongst them specimens of both the old and modern style. Mr. H. J. Price, of Long Ditton, had an excellent team, his Ditton Brevity and Gaiety being particularly excellent the one a blue and white, the other a tricolour. Mr. Carew-Gibson, of Fareham, in Grove Rose and Merry Belle, had a brace of beauties, also of the old type, and his first named won chief prize; but other leading honours of third and reserve were given to miniature modern spaniels, both black, but certainly not like Rose and Brevity, that took first and second honours. Mr. Phillips' Rivington Merry Legs was another of the pure strain, a black and white, that, I believe, came from Exeter.

I have particularly drawn attention to this class at Manchester in proof, if such were needed, that there still remains material in the country to popularise the old-fashioned breed of cocker, and I fancy this