CHAPTER II.

A year passed; a year and three months. Old Mrs Puckey was dead and laid in churchyard, and the doctor remained a bachelor. Christmas found him busy upon two papers written almost concurrently: the one 'A Description of a Kind of Trigla vulgarly confounded with Trigla Blochii,' intended for Loudon's 'Magazine of Natural History,' the other, 'On Savagery in Dogs and Methods of Meeting their Attacks,' for the Journal of the Royal Institution of Cornwall.

On the morning of St Stephen's (or Boxing) Day, his professional visits over, he devoted an hour to the second of these treatises. He had reached this striking passage,—

     'Homer informs us that the fury of a dog in attacking an
      approaching stranger is appeased by the man's sitting down:—

       '"Soon as Ulysses near th' enclosure drew,
         With open mouths the furious mastiffs flew:
         Down sat the sage and, cautious to withstand,
         Let fall th' offensive truncheon from his hand."
                                            Pope.

     'Even at the present day this is a well-understood mode of
      defence, as will be seen from the following:—

'At Argos one evening, at the table of General Gordon, then commander-in-chief in the Morea, the conversation happened to turn on the number and fierceness of Greek dogs, when one of the company remarked that he knew a very simple expedient for appeasing their fury. Happening on a journey to miss his road, and being overtaken with darkness, he sought refuge for the night at a pastoral settlement by the wayside. As he approached, the dogs rushed out upon him, and the consequences might have been serious had he not been rescued by an old shepherd, the Eumaeus of the fold, who sallied forth and, finding that the intruder was but a frightened traveller, after pelting off his assailants, gave him a hospitable reception in his hut. His guest made some remark on the watchfulness and zeal of his dogs, and on the danger to which he had been exposed in their attack. The old man replied that it was his own fault for not taking the customary precaution in such an emergency, that he ought to have stopped and sat down, until some person whom the animals knew came to protect him.

'As this expedient was new to the traveller he made some further inquiries, and was assured that if any person in such a predicament will simply seat himself on the ground, laying aside his weapons of defence, the dogs will also squat around in a circle; that as long as he remains quiet they will follow his example, but as soon as he rises and moves forward they will renew the attack.'

At this point the doctor laid down his pen, arose, and went to the book-case for his Homer, with purpose to copy the original lines into a footnote—for, to tell the truth, he had never quite mastered the methods of the Greek accents. He found the passage in Odyssey 14. Yes, it was all right—

autar Odysseus Ezeto kerdosune, skeptrou de oi ekpese cheiros . . .

But—hallo! what was this next line?—

Eutha kev o para stathmo aeikelion pathen algos . . .

—'There by his own steading,' the poet went on, 'would Odysseus have suffered foul hurt, had not the swineherd hurried out and scolded the dogs and pelted them off with stones.' It would seem then, according to Homer, that this device of squatting upon the ground could not be trusted save as a diversion, a temporary check. Doctor Unonius bit his nether lip. Strange that he had overlooked this. . . .

He had a scholar's conscience. He could not endure to garble a quotation or suppress a material point for the sake of illustrating an argument more vividly. . . . Besides, it might delude some unfortunate person into sitting down where self-preservation demanded a more alert posture. Somebody—dreadful thought!—might get himself severely bitten, mauled, mangled perhaps to death, merely by obeying a piece of pseudo-scientific advice. That he, Doctor Unonius, might never be reproached with the disaster, might never even hear of it, in no degree mitigated his responsibility.

While he stood by the bookcase, balancing his spectacles on his forefinger and Homer's words in his mind, Jenifer, his one small maid-servant, entered with word that Roger Olver was at the door with a message from Penalune.

'Show him in,' said Doctor Unonius.

So Roger Olver, huntsman and handy-man to Sir John Penalune of Penalune, squire of Polpeor, hitched his horse's bridle on the staple by the doctor's front door—it would be hard to compute how many farmers, husbands, riding down at dead of night with news of wives in labour, had tethered their horses to that well-worn staple—and was conducted by Jenifer to the doctor's study.

'Ah! Good morning, Roger!'

'Mornin', y'r honour. Sir John bade me ride down an' ask 'ee—'

'To be sure—to be sure. As it happens, no man could have come at a happier moment. Accustomed, as you are, to dogs—'

'Hounds,' corrected Roger.

'It makes no difference.' The doctor translated the passage, and explained his difficulty.

'I reckon,' said Roger, after scratching his head, 'the gentleman acted right in settin' down—though I've never had occasion to try it, dogs bein' fond o' me by natur'. I've heard, too, that a very good way, when a dog goes for you, is to squatty 'pon your heels with your coat-tails breshin' the ground an' bust out laffin' in his face. I tell that for what 'tis worth.'

'Thank you,' said the doctor. 'I will make a note of it.'

'It wants nerve, seemin' to me.' Roger Olver rubbed his chin.

'That is understood.'

'For my part, if it happened I had a stick, I'd slash out at the beggar's forelegs—so—an' keep slashin' same as if I was mowin' grass. Or, if I hadn' a stick, I'd kick straight for his forelegs an' chest; he's easy to cripple there, an' he knows it. Settin' down may be all right for the time, only the difficulty is you've got to get up again sooner or later—onless help arrives.'

'Eureka!' exclaimed Doctor Unonius, rushing to his notes.

'I beg y'r honour's pardon?'

'The modern instance says that the dogs would remain seated in a circle round the man; that so long as he remained seated they would do the same; but that, if he attempted to rise, they would renew the attack. That vindicates me, and explains Homer.'

'Do it?' said Roger Olver. 'But, beggin' your pardon, sir, if it's about dogs you want to know, why not have a look in at the kennels— ay, an' follow the hounds now an' then? I've often wondered, makin' so bold, how a gentleman like yourself, an' knowin' what's good for health, can go wastin' time on dead fishes, with a pack o' hounds, so to speak, at your door.'

'There's no sport more healthful, I verily believe,' agreed the doctor.

'And as for nat'ral history, what can a man want that he can't larn off a fox? Five-an'-twenty years I've been at it, an' the varmints be teachin' me yet. But I'm forgettin' my message, sir, which is that Sir John sends his compliments and would be happy to see you at dinner this evenin', he havin' a few friends.'

Doctor Unonius sighed. He had designed to spend the evening on his treatise. But he cherished a real regard for Sir John, whom all the countryside esteemed for a sportsman and an upright English gentleman; and Sir John, who, without learning of his own, held learning in exaggerated respect, cherished an equal regard for the doctor.

'My compliments to your master. I will come with pleasure,' said
Doctor Unonius, thrusting Homer back in his shelf.