Strangely enough, this word as a verb is not to be found in Jamieson's dictionary of the Scottish dialect, but Jamieson gives "dugon" as a noun. It is given in the supplement to Jamieson, however, as "dogon," but still as a noun, with an ancient plural _dogonis_. It is explained as "a term of contempt." The example cited by Jamieson is Hogg's "Winter Tales," I. 292, and is as follows: "What wad my father say if I were to marry a man that loot himsel' be thrashed by Tommy Potts, a great supple wi' a back nae stiffer than a willy brand? . . . When one comes to close quarters wi' him he's but a dugon." Halliwell and Wright give _dogon_ as a noun, and mark it Anglo-Norman, but they apparently know it only from Jamieson and the supplement to Jamieson, where _dogguin_ is cited from Cotgrave as meaning "a filthie old curre," and _doguin_ from Roquefort, defined by "brutal, currish" [hargneux]. A word with the same orthography, _doguin_, is still used in French for puppy. It is of course a question whether the noun _dogon_ and its French antecedents are connected with the American verb _dog-on_. It is easy to conceive that such an epithet as _dogon_ might get itself mixed up with the word dog, and so become an imprecation. For instance, a servant in the family of a friend of mine in Indiana, wishing to resign her place before the return of some daughters of the house whom she had never seen, announced that she was going to leave "before them dog-on girls got home." Here the word might have been the old epithet, or an abbreviated participle. _Dogged_ is apparently a corruption of dog-on in the phrase "I'll be dogged." I prefer _dog-on_ to _dogone_, because in the dialect the sense of setting a dog on is frequently present to the speaker, though far enough away from the primitive sense of the word; perhaps.] CHAPTER II. A SPELL COMING. There was a moment of utter stillness; but the magnetism of Ralph's eye was too much for Bill Means. The request was so polite, the master's look was so innocent and yet so determined. Bill often wondered afterward that he had not "fit" rather than obeyed the request. But somehow he put the dog out. He was partly surprised, partly inveighed, partly awed into doing just what he had not intended to do. In the week that followed, Bill had to fight half a dozen boys for calling him "Puppy Means." Bill said he wished he'd licked the master on the spot. 'Twould 'a' saved five fights out of the six. And all that day and the next, the bulldog in the master's eye was a terror to evil-doers. At the close of school on the second day Bud was heard to give it as his opinion that "the master wouldn't be much in a tussle, but he had a heap of thunder and lightning in him." Did he inflict corporal punishment? inquires some philanthropic friend. Would you inflict corporal punishment if you were tiger-trainer in Van Amburgh's happy family? But poor Ralph could never satisfy his constituency in this regard.