Once, and once only--bullied out of all endurance by a half-drunken carrier--did we consent to let thee engage in a pitched battle with a mastiff victorious in fifty fights--a famous shanker--and a throttler beyond all compare. It was indeed a bloody business--now growling along the glaur of the road--a hairy hurricane--now snorting in the suffocating ditch--now fair play on the clean and clear crown of the causey--now rolling over and over through a chance-open white little gate, into a cottage-garden--now separated by choking them both with a cord--now brought out again with savage and fiery eyes to the scratch on a green plat round the signboard-swinging tree in the middle of the village--auld women in their mutches crying out, "Shame! whare's the minister?"--young women, with combs in their pretty heads, blinking with pale and almost weeping faces from low-lintelled doors--children crowding for sight and safety on the louping-on-stane--and loud cries ever and anon at each turn and eddy of the fight, of "Well done, Fro! well done, Fro!--see how he worries his windpipe--well done, Fro!" for Fro was the delight and glory of the whole parish, and the honour of all its inhabitants, male and female, was felt to be staked on the issue--while at intervals was heard the harsh hoarse voice of the carrier and his compeers, cursing and swearing in triumph in a many-oathed language peculiar to the race that drive the broad-wheeled waggons with the high canvass roofs, as the might of Teeger prevailed, and the indomitable Fro seemed to be on his last legs beneath a grip of the jugular, and then stretched motionless and passive--in defeat or death. A mere _ruse_ to recover wind. Like unshorn Sampson starting from his sleep, and snapping like fired flax the vain bands of the Philistines, Fro whammled Teeger off, and twisting round his head in spite of the grip on the jugular, the skin stretching and giving way in a ghastly but unfelt wound, he suddenly seized with all his tusks his antagonist's eye, and bit it clean out of the socket. A yowl of unendurable pain--spouting of blood--sickness--swooning--tumbling over--and death. His last fight is over! His remaining eye glazed--his protruded tongue bitten in anguish by his own grinding teeth--his massy hind-legs stretched out with a kick like a horse--his short tail stiffens--he is laid out a grim corpse--flung into a cart tied behind the waggon--and off to the tanyard.