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CHAPTER XV.

YORKSHIRE AND OTHER TOY TERRIERS.

THE charming, aristocratic little dog we now know as the Yorkshire terrier has been identified as such for but a comparatively short period, the Kennel Club adopting this nomenclature in their Stud Book for 1886. Prior to this date the name had been hanging about him for some few years, because the names of rough, broken-haired, or Scotch terrier, under which he was first known, were most misleading. During the early days of dog shows the classes in which he competed included terriers of almost any variety, from the cross-bred mongrel to the Dandie Dinmont, the Skye terrier, and the Bedlington. Indeed, twenty years since it was no uncommon sight to see wire-haired fox terriers figuring with others of a silkier coat under the one common head of "rough or broken-haired terriers." As a fact, a broken-haired terrier should have been altogether a short-coated dog-the Yorkshire is long-coated to a greater extent than any other

variety of the terrier; nor was the title Scotch terrier, by which he was most frequently known, at all adaptable to him.

How the name of Scotch terrier became attached to a dog which so thoroughly had its home in Yorkshire and Lancashire is somewhat difficult to determine, if it can be determined at all, but a very old breeder of the variety told me that the first of them originally came from Scotland, where they had been accidentally produced from a cross between the silky-coated Skye terrier (the Clydesdale) and the black and tan terrier. One could scarcely expect that a pretty dog, partaking in a degree after both its parents, could be produced from a first cross between a smooth-coated dog, and a long-coated bitch or vice versa. Maybe, two or three dogs so bred had been brought by some of the Paisley weavers into Yorkshire, and there, suitably admired, pains were taken to perpetuate the strain. There appears to be something feasible and practical in this story, and I am sorry that when the information was given me, nearly a quarter of a century since, by a Yorkshire weaver then sixty years old and since dead, I did not obtain more particulars about what was in his day called the Scotch terrier.

However, this is the Yorkshire terrier now, and will

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