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Stone walls are made for sunny lounging; yet stone walls in Marathon are built with uneven vertical projections to discourage the sedentary. Nothing is more delightful than a dog; but there are no dogs in Marathon. They are all airedales or spaniels or mastiffs. If an ordinary dog should wag his tail up our street the airedales would cut him dead.
His detractors often accuse him of being hard-mouthed, but this charge is not well founded. Many a dog which is used to hunt or find game as well as to retrieve it, will often kill a wounded bird or rabbit rather than allow it to escape, while there are many Irish Water Spaniels who, under normal circumstances, are just as tender-mouthed as the most fashionable of black Retrievers.
COLOUR Plain white with lemon markings; orange permissible but not desirable; slight head markings with white body preferred. GENERAL APPEARANCE Should be that of a long, low, heavy, very massive dog, with a thoughtful expression. The modern race of Sussex Spaniels, as we know it, owes its origin in the main to the kennel kept by Mr. Fuller at Rosehill Park, Brightling, near Hastings.
Mesdames had beautiful spaniels; little grayhounds were preferred by Madame Elisabeth. Louis XVI. was the only one of all his family who had no dogs in his room. I remember one day waiting in the great gallery for the King's retiring, when he entered with all his family and the whole pack, who were escorting him.
"I have received very favourable accounts of you, sir. And your letters, which are for the public eye, are perfectly in order. Well; I will remember, Mr. Mallock. Meanwhile you had best not shew yourself at Court in public too much." He put out his hand to be kissed. "And you will give my compliments to my brother James," he said. One of the spaniels snored in his sleep as I went out again.
When his claims were first put forward they were vigorously contested by many who could claim to speak and write with authority upon the various breeds of Spaniels existing in these islands, and it was freely asserted that they were nothing but crossbreds between the ordinary Springer and probably a Clumber in order to account for the red or orange markings and the vine-leaf-shaped ears.
Dick's adventures ended more unfortunately for him, as I fear he never got over its effects. I again, as on the last occasion, heard him evidently furiously engaged with something in a thick wood. After crawling on my hands and knees for some time, I found Dick and two other of my spaniels in furious combat with an enormous wild cat, who when I came up was holding her own against the dogs.
I have known many instances when, on hearing a jolly row in the covert, I have crawled in on my hands and knees, and found a boar being bayed by my spaniels in fact, I have killed more pigs in this way than in any other. The danger is that you may have your dogs killed by the boar; this has happened to me on one or two occasions, more especially with young dogs.
And now one tired old woman walked there, with names on her lips that she never uttered. A friendly riot of fox terriers and spaniels greeted the carriage, leaping and rolling and yelping in an exuberance of sociability, as though horses and coachman and groom were comrades who had been absent for long months instead of half an hour.
"That fellow Carvel," Balsamides would say, "is the ultimate expression of your Western civilization, which tends to make all men alike. I cannot understand why you are both so fond of him. To me he is insipid as boiled cucumber. He ought to be a banker's clerk instead of a diplomatist. The idea of his serving his country is about as absurd as hunting bears with toy spaniels."
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