"DIGNITY AND IMPUDENCE." 125
would wrest himself from her grasp, and rot after Dick,
already scampering away in the distance.
 Sometimes these hunts lasted as long as three or four
days. Naturally, the dogs were unwilling to come back to the
disgrace which awaited them, and they could subsist in the
meantime on the spoil which they caught and slew. The
neighbourhood of the great wide moor and fragment of
forest-a broad brown and dark green tract stretching, with a
suggestion of wonder and mystery, along the whole expanse
of cultivated country-rendered it specially difficult to discover
the direction the dogs had taken, running as the birds flew,
and making nothing of hedges, ditches, and dykes" in their
progress, after they were fairly out of sight. It was the solv-
ing of a puzzle to pursue and apprehend them. Sometimes a
wayfarer passed and recognized them, and brought the tidings
of their whereabouts to "the farm town." Sometimes the
dogs' master, when he went to the weekly market in the quaint
town I have described, received information from a neighbour
which enabled him to track the fugitives. Oftenest they
returned of their own accord, spent and sated, brought back
by some compulsion of law, some tie of dependence and affec-
tion, which was in the end too powerful for their desire to
rove, so that they could not become wild dogs again, or desert
their aggrieved human friends for a permanence.
 Knowing the district as I do, I have great sympathy with
Wallace and Dick. Had I possessed Wallace's capacity of
endurance, or Dick's youthful fleetness of foot and length of
wind-had I shared their relish for hares and rabbits, torn
limb from limb, and their capacity of thriving on the same-I
too should have liked to wander for days among these fresh
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