I have heard said he is proud; I have even heard it asserted he is perky. He may be ; but to my eyes it is his self-sufficiency that is attractive, and his delightful deliberation. Terrier though he be, he never appears in a hurry. In this respect I would liken him to the St. Bernard. At times, like his master, he can be merry, though cast in a sober mould. It is a restrained merriment that does not yap, and bark, and sprint around, but indicates delight subdued with a proper sense of dignity. So have I seen highly respectable Scotsmen on St. Andrew's Night. Indeed, in temperament he is a Scot of Scots, especially in his shyness outside his native haunts. It requires his foot

to be on his native heath for his name to be Macgregor! For the rest, he is a very wise, determined, dry, unostentatious, brave little fellow, and has come to be loved as much as any terrier in this book.

His dignity, to which I have referred, may be due to his antiquity. Mr. Rawdon Lee believes him to be the oldest unit of the canine race indigenous to North Britain. This, as terrier ancestry goes, is a high certificate from a high authority, and should make him proud. But it has been his misfortune to be muddled up with other clans, which introduces an element of uncertainty into his past. For years he was called the Skye" terrier, which he is not, in our acceptation of the term. When you read of Skyes in old writers it is just as likely as not that the allusion is to Die-hards. One analyser would ally this essentially Highland species to the essentially lowland Dandie Dinmont, which is clearly preposterous. Then again the Scottish terrier has borne the burden of many names before being settled with his present one. He was known at different times and indifferently as the Skye (Dalziel illustrates a member of his family as such), the High

land terrier, the Cairn terrier, the Broken-haired terrier, and the Aberdeen terrier. Also as the Scots and Scotch terrier, and, affectionately as the Die-hard-a noble title bestowed on him by the first Earl of Dumbarton, and subsequently transferred to the First Royal Scots. Die-hards and Dare-Devils-such are the names which the terrier tribes of the sister kingdoms have given us. Who could wish for better fighting sobriquets? What grander regimental nicknames do you want than these? The spirit of the two nations. speaks eloquently through the nomenclature of their respective terriers.

Whilst the pedigree of the Scottish terrier does not run very far back on paper, it extends into a dim past in tradition. Pedigree - dogs were purely a later Victorian product, and their records mostly issue from the ark of the dog show established in the 'Sixties. This particular terrier was used, as one of its names implies, to bolt foxes from the cairns, or stone and boulder encumbered sides of the Scotch hills-a work hedged with limitations, for a way is not to be scratched through granite crevices. For percolating such obstacles a long, low dog was necessary, and one possessing singular strength and hardiness. All of these qualities

are to be found in the Scottish terrier in a marked degree. In a country where the conformation of the surface made hunting with hounds impossible, and where foxes and other destructive vermin played havoc, there was called into useful and necessary being a race of vermin destroyers, known as tod- or fox-hunters, whose livelihood depended on their success in the chase of their quarry, and whose success depended on the staunchness and ability of their terriers. Hence, even in those rude times, a rude process of selection took place in the breeding of the dogs, and that process

stamped the Scottish terrier with the sturdy characteristics he displays to-day.

There were several strains of this working terrier in Scotland. Dalziel recalls one he knew as a boy, "the old, hard, and short-haired Terry' of the west of Scotland, much like a modern fox terrier in shape, but with a shorter, rounder head, the colour of his hard, wiry coat mostly sandy, the face free from long hair, although some showing a beard, and the small ears carried in some instances semi-erect, in some pricked." I have no doubt some of that type of terrier blood filtered into the north of Ireland, where it is known that at one time dogs were imported from across the water. But it was from other strains that the Die-hard is descended. Three are particularly mentioned by Mr. Gordon Murray in his Dogs of Scotland-the Mogstads, the Drynocks, and the Camusennaries—types with long, low bodies, dark wiry hair, and generally prick-eared. Only two of our British sporting dogs sport the prick ear, and they both come from Scotland: the Skye (in one variety) and the Scottish. The prick ear is one of the most distinctive hereditary traits in the canine group, and is confined to families which favour the wolf or wild-dog in conformation of the head, being allied to a pointed muzzle; its occurrence in the French bulldog is a triumph of aural over facial conformation. However, this is a departure from my subject. What I desired to point out was the important proof the prick ear supplies in tracing descent. The strains I have quoted were all prick-eared, and the latter was fostered by a Lieutenant Macmillan, one of the earliest fanciers, if not the earliest, of this breed on record.

In later years came Captain Mackie, the pioneer of the modern breed, who possessed a splendid kennel of the terriers, in getting together which he searched the

VOL. II

2 C