I remember the scene and circumstances as if the event had happened yesterday. My mother had strolled beyond the garden to “the front of the brae,” as it was called, or the brow of the green, grassy hill on which the old white house was built. It commanded a wide stretch of links or downs, met by the blue girdle of the Frith, having for its fringe, all along the coast, clusters of ancient villages—fishing or trading—with red-tiled or blue-slated houses, and round-belfried or sharp-pointed steeples of parish kirks. I think no place was ever fresher or sunnier than that “front of the brae” on a summer morning, though in winter it was a bleak and windy station enough. Some young colts, feeding, as they usually did, on the links, had ventured to the summit of the brae, and were approaching the stackyard. Fido was scampering among the yellow ragwort and purple bur thistles in my mother’s vicinity, and on the impulse of the moment she sent him after the young horses. The rash suggestion was only too acceptable. Without a shade of hesitation or fear, the morsel of a dog made a dart at the heels of what were the hugest elephants to him, and though the colts had turned to retreat, he reached them in time to be spurned by one of the flying hoofs, and to fall down with his back or neck broken. I have a vivid recollection of the consternation and grief of the little group that gathered in the great kitchen, into which the lifeless little dog was carried—of one of Fido’s young mistresses wildly entreating to have wine put within the half-open jaws of the dead dog—of the grave shake of the head with which some senior negatived the desperate proposal, and of my mother’s kindly distress at having caused the catastrophe, which had extinguished the spark of life in one of God’s happy creatures, and occasioned such affliction to the children. I remember what a blight came over the bright day; how I rose from my dinner in a passion of sorrow, because in a moment of forgetfulness I had begun to lay aside some scrap for the dog which had ceased to need scraps; and how I walked in the garden among the Maundy roses and tall white Canterbury bells, and gathered—to store for a melancholy memorial—some early seeds of the nasturtium with which the little animal had been fond of playing, and in which there remained the marks of his tiny teeth. I have had greater losses since then, but I have not forgotten that first shock and stab of irretrievable separation. To console us children for being deprived of our pet—and, I daresay, as some small atonement in her own person—my mother furnished us with money to buy another dog; an act in which there was a departure from the family practice of not spending what little money was to spare unnecessarily, and, above all, of not accustoming the children to anything that could be regarded as extravagance or self-indulgence. In our whole connection with dogs, this was the only instance in which one became ours by purchase.