Next to the beauty of its girls my little Western home is noted for two things--the ferocity of its dogs and its bountiful provision for assuaging an attack of thirst. For the latter there are fifteen houses, ten of which have licences and the rest back-doors. We are by birth a temperate people, but there is much salt in the air. Our dogs are very like ourselves, as peaceable and well-conducted as can be, except when some rascal takes up their challenge and makes faces at them or trails a tail of too much pretension and too suddenly in their neighbourhood. Then the fur is apt to fly. "What a degrading spectacle a dog-fight is!" Moriarty, who takes up the collection in church and has thus a semi-ecclesiastical status in life, which shows itself in his speech, said this to me only last evening. There were about a hundred of us trying to hide this degrading spectacle from the police and other innocent people, and Moriarty had just lost three-and-sixpence on Casey's dog. "A degrading spectacle indeed," said I. "If Casey's dog had held out two minutes longer he had the other dog beat. I am disappointed in Casey's dog." It _was_ degrading, and I am glad I had only half-a-crown on it. So I paid up to our collector of rates and taxes and came home. This little incident made me think of Billy O'Brien, our next-door neighbour. Billy had one passion in life, and that was the rearing of a dog that could whip any combination in the vicinity. Billy said life wasn't worth living if he could not walk in the streets without some neighbour's dog beating his. Billy had failed hitherto, and this is not surprising to one who knows the dogs of Ballybun. They are Irish terriers to a dog, and all of them living instances of the doctrine of the survival of the fittest. The air of Ballybun is bad for a dog with a weak chest who thinks he has a strong one. Billy experimented with many breeds and had many glimpses of success, but a Ballybun dog always put an end to his experiments. Last year Billy thought he had achieved his aim at last. When he returned from the sea-side he brought with him a powerful dog of unknown breed and of the most colossal ugliness. He confided to me that he would not let him out on the street until his education was complete, "and then," said he, "there will be only one dog in the Ballybun census." I had my doubts, as I know the local dog, which would have the hide off an elephant if it barked. But Billy O'Brien is a stranger, or as we say "transplanter" in our part of Ireland, his grandfather being the first of his branch to transplant himself here, and he did not then know much about the higher education of dog, though he is an admirable inspector of schools.