Types of Children's Literature: A Collection of the World's Best Literature for Children, For Use in Colleges, Normal Schools and Library Schools
General
Types of Children's Literature: A Collection of the World's Best Literature for Children, For Use in Colleges, Normal Schools and Library Schools
Children's literature
I got her away to bed. "May Rab and me bide?" said James. "_You_
may; and Rab, if he will behave himself." "I'se warrant he's do that,
doctor"; and in slunk the faithful beast. I wish you could have seen
him. There are no such dogs now. He belonged to a lost tribe. As I have
said, he was brindle, and gray like Rubislaw granite, his hair short,
hard, and close, like a lion's; his body thick set, like a little bull--
a sort of compressed Hercules of a dog. He must have been ninety
pounds' weight, at the least; he had a large blunt head, his muzzle
black as night, his mouth blacker than any night, a tooth or two--being
all he had--gleaming out of his jaws of darkness. His head was scarred
with the records of old wounds, a sort of series of fields of battle
all over it; one eye out, one ear cropped as close as was Archbishop
Leighton's father's; the remaining eye had the power of two; and above
it, and in constant communication with it, Was a tattered rag of an ear
which was forever unfurling itself, like an old flag; and then that bud
of a tail, about one inch long, if it could in any sense be said to be
long, being as broad as long--the mobility, the instantaneousness of
that bud were very funny and surprising, and its expressive twinklings
and winkings, the intercommunications between the eye, the ear, and it,
were of the oddest and swiftest.
Rab had the dignity and simplicity of great size; and having fought his
way all along the road to absolute supremacy, he was as mighty in his
own line as Julius Caesar or the Duke of Wellington, and had the
gravity [Footnote: A Highland game-keeper, when asked why a certain
terrier, of singular pluck, was so much more solemn than the other
dogs, said, "Oh, Sir, life's full o' sairiousness to him--he just never
can get enuff o' fechtin'."] of all great fighters.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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