The chronicler does not state what M. St. Remi did with all that money,--though we may be safe in supposing that he very exactly knew; but we would fain hope that he expended a moiety of it in founding a retreat for decayed dogs, as a monument to the poor little spaniel so faithful to him in life and in death.
Sporting dogs,--the setter, the pointer, the fox-hound, and all the several varieties of hound, have had their historians, from Dame Juliana Berners to Peter Beckford, and that more recent Peter whose patronymic was Hawker; while, on our side of the Atlantic, the late "Frank Forester" has reduced kennel-practice to a system from which the Nimrod of the ramrod may not profitably depart. Apart from history, however, and from didactic argument, the individual trails of dogs remarkable in their day have but too rarely been recorded. Certainly the shepherd's colley has been admirably individualized by the Ettrick Shepherd; but many a terrier--"a fellow of infinite fancy"--has passed through the world's worry without ever seeing his name in print,--unless, indeed, he happened to have fallen among thieves, and found himself lamp-posted accordingly,--has passed the grizzle-muzzle period of doghood unbiographied, and gone down to his last burrow unsung.
Among the regrets with which we are saddled for our omissions, not the least of mine is now galling me for having neglected to reduce to writing, on the spot, curious facts which fell under my immediate notice in the course of many years' companionship with a somewhat miscellaneous assortment of canine friends,--
"The little dogs and all, Tray, Blanche, and Sweetheart."
Nevertheless, I will endeavor to bring together in this paper such stray reminiscences of doggery in general as may occur to me while I write, illustrating the subject, as I proceed, with occasional passages from the careers, of humble, but eccentric individuals of the race.
Extinction has been the fate of some varieties of the dog, which have been either superseded by the progress of machinery, or have gone to decay in consequence of the annihilation of the animals for the chase of which they were maintained. When there were wolves in the mosses and caverns of Ireland, for example, there were wolf-dogs to hunt them. The last wolf of that country--and _he_ was a wonder, from the then rarity of the animal--was killed about one hundred and fifty years ago; and although the breed of hound then known as the Irish wolf-dog--one of the largest, noblest, and most courageous of the canine race--was kept up to some extent for nearly a century later, we doubt much whether a single pure specimen of the variety is now in existence; unless, indeed, it may so happen that some _ultimus Romanorum_ of the tribe still licks his patrician chops in the kennels of the Marquis of Sligo, in the possession of which family the last litter was many years ago supposed to be.