A Book of Famous Dogs

Albert Payson Terhune

Description

Contained within this rare book is a fascinating treatise on the unsung history of the dog and his place beside man as his best friend, written by the authority on the subject and master of dog-based writing, Albert Terhune. The perfect book for dog-lovers, this title will greatly appeal to fans of Terhune’s work and collectors of canine-based literature. This book has been elected for modern republication due to its timeless literary value, republished now in the hopes that it will continue to be read and enjoyed in the future as it has in the past. Albert Payson Terhune (1872 –1942) was an American author, journalist, and passionate breeder of dogs, most famous for his prolific stories detailing the misadventures of canines. This book was originally published in 1937 and is proudly republished here with a new prefatory biography of the author.

Sujets

• Pets
• Dogs

Informations

• Publié par: Read Books Ltd.
• Date de parution: 15 avril 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781473392984
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

A BOOK OF FAMOUS DOGS
Copyright 2013 Read Books Ltd. This book is copyright and may not be reproduced or copied in any way without the express permission of the publisher in writing
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Contents
Albert Payson Terhune
Foreword
How It All Began
Chapter I
Some Dogs of Ancient Days
Chapter II
Dogs That Traveled Far
Chapter III
The Dogs of Kings
Chapter IV
Professional Mourners
Chapter V
Some Sunnybank Dogs
Chapter VI
Dogs of Great Authors
Chapter VII
Ghost Dogs
Chapter VIII
Dogs Behind the Footlights
Chapter IX
Let Slip the Dogs of War!
Chapter X
Some Freak Dogs
Chapter XI
Some Hero Dogs
Albert Payson Terhune
Albert Payson Terhune was born on 21 st December 1872, in New Jersey, United States. Terhune s father was the Reverend Edward Payson Terhune and his mother, Mary Virginia Hawes, was a writer of household management books and pre-Civil War novels under the name Marion Harland. He was one of six children, having four sisters and one brother, but only two of his sisters survived until adulthood. Further tragedy beset the family when his own wife, Lorraine Bryson Terhune, died four days after giving birth to their only child. He later remarried Anice Terhune, but had no more children.
Terhune received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Columbia University in 1893. The following year, he took a job as a reporter at the New York newspaper The Evening World , a position he held for the next twenty years. During this period, he began to publish works of fiction, such as Dr. Dale: A Story Without A Moral (1900), The New Mayor (1907), Caleb Conover, Railroader (1907), and The Fighter (1909). However, it was his short stories about his collie Lad, published in Red Book, Saturday Evening Post, Ladies Home Journal, Hartford Courant , and the Atlantic Monthly , that brought him mainstream success. A dozen of these tales were collected in to novel form and released as Lad: A Dog in 1919. This was a best-seller and in 1962 was adapted into a feature film. He went on to produce over thirty novels focussing on the lives of dogs and enjoyed much success in the genre.
Terhune s interest in canines was by no means restricted to fiction. He became a celebrated dog-breeder, specialising in rough collies, lines of which still exist in the breed today. Sunnybank kennels were the most famous collie kennels in the United States and the estate is now open to the public and known as Terhune Memorial Park. Terhune died on 18 th February 1942 and was buried at the Pompton Reformed Church in Pompton Lakes, New Jersey.
FOREWORD
How It All Began
M AN AND THE DOG are the only creatures that worship Man.
Nobody knows why the Dog alone, of all animal-kind, chooses Man as his god and serves him with eager willingness. When Man conquered the world, he drove into the jungles and waste places such beasts as he could not subdue. The rest of the brute creation he coerced into service for work or for food.
All but the Dog.
Of his own accord, the Dog came into camp. He elected himself not only the servant of Man, but his pal and protector. It was a voluntary adoption, an adoring, eagerly willing servitude which no other beast emulated.
Much has been conjectured-most of it wrongly, no doubt-as to the queer and breakless bond which links Man and Dog. But the mystery never has been solved. Nor will it be.
The lion, the tiger, the bear, the wolf, the leopard, and their like-these were irreconcilables, from the hour of their first clash with the biped conqueror of the globe. So they went into eternal exile.
Gramnivorous beasts were conquered, and either were put to work or to the feeding or clothing of their new master. They accepted their lot. But only because they had to and because it was their livelihood. Goats, sheep, cattle, swine, will stray at the first opportunity from the human who has made himself their overlord.
And it is the Dog which-often self-taught-rounds them up and brings them home. He is the one animal which of his own accord places Man above his own four-footed comrades, and herds or hunts them for Man s profit and pleasure. Definitely, of his own free will, he has ranged himself on Man s side in the eternal conflict. Why? Again, nobody knows. It is one of the cosmic mysteries.
By the way, there is one furry exception-and only one-to the rule of Serve or be banished! : The Cat.
When Man divided the brute kingdom into Slave or Enemy, the Cat refused to join either class. It declined to go into jungle exile with the Wild. It declined to toil or to provide food or clothes, along with the Tame. It declared itself in on every benefit lavished upon the Tame, and it refused to do a lick of work in return. Of all created things, the Cat is most sublimely and unconquerably and contemptuously independent of Man. (I wonder if that can account for the world-old cat-and-dog feud. Probably not. But it is an interesting speculation.)
The Man-Dog alliance goes far back of history or even of legend. Digger scientists have found bones of men and of dogs close to each other in prehistoric cave dwellings, proving the chumship was in full force before the tusked Neanderthaler was exercising the tricky art of walking on his hind legs.
Perhaps, in lush seasons, cavemen caught very young puppies and kept them alive until winter should bring famine to the land. Perhaps, during those months of waiting, the biped learned that the pups had an instinct to sound the alarm when an intruder came near the cave and that they would risk life to repel such a foe. Perhaps the biped learned, too, that the pups were of use in stalking and catching game and that they had an odd gift of comradeship for Man.

THE NEANDERTHAL MAN S DOG
Perhaps that is why they and their descendants were kept alive instead of eaten during the lean seasons. A dog had better practical value to his master, living, than as part of a menu.
Perhaps that was the start of it all. Or perhaps not. It all is a matter of Perhaps.
Yet when earliest history dawned, the Man and Dog partnership long had been on a firm basis. Some of the first decipherable stone carvings attest to this. So do the first fragmentary annals of our race. The most ancient literature, from hieroglyphs down through Sanscrit writings and the Bible, is peppered with allusions to it.
The Bible has eighteen references to dogs. I am sorry to say that seventeen of these are anything but laudatory; while the eighteenth-the Apocrypha tale of young Tobias walk with the Angel-is coldly negative: The young man s dog was with them.
The Dog, in some phase or other, plays a part in most normal human lives. From the small boy who drags into the house a canine street waif and entreats the Home Government s leave to keep it; to the aging man who dreams of retiring to the country, where he can have a dog of his own.
If I may judge by the countless myriads of anecdotes and reminiscences I have had to listen to, the Dog is also one of the too-few infallibly strong pillars which prop the tottery temple of conversation.
Long ago the American Kennel Club issued its millionth registration certificate. When you recall that no dog may be registered unless its pedigree be proven flawlessly pure, and that there are hundreds of non-registered and non-registerable dogs to each one that can be registered, the million registrations may give you some faint idea of our canine population s size.
If you will stop to consider that practically every one of these dogs has, or has had, an owner, you will realize what a stupendously strong element in human life the Dog has become.
So much for introduction to this book of mine. I am not going to carry the Dog down through the ages in scholarly fashion; or indeed at all. I am going to tell you true stories about him.
I shall not arrange these tales in chronological order. But I shall try, more or less, to group them as to subject matter. Thus, Dogs of Ancient Days may rub shoulders with sagas of my Sunnybank collies. And the latter may find themselves sandwiched between Dogs of War and Dogs of Kings-far better company than the lovable disreputables merit.
Some of the stories you have read in earlier and more worth-while volumes. Others, I hope, may be new to you. None are original with me. For that matter, Victor Hugo did not invent the Battle of Waterloo. Yet he built a mighty good yarn out of it. Perhaps, in infinitely lesser fashion, I may be able to retell a handful of the world s deathless dog stories well enough to please you.
I can only hope so.
A LBERT P AYSON T ERHUNE
Sunnybank
Pompton Lakes, New Jersey .
CHAPTER I
Some Dogs of Ancient Days
I N THE MUSEUM of Pompeii there are two distorted figures, side by side, amid the horde of other gruesome plaster casts. One figure is a child s. The other is a dog s. On the dog s twisted throat you may see the outlines of a collar whose Latin inscription runs:
Thrice has this dog saved his little master from death: once from fire, once from flood, once from thieves .
Because the dog could not save the child from death a fourth time and because he chose to die with his worshipped young master rather than seek safety without him, the two bodies lie today close beside each other-more than eighteen hundred years after the disaster that killed them both.
When I say the dog chose to die with his master rather than to escape, it is not a mere guess. Practically no animals, except those stabled or tied, were caught in the avalanche of lava and of fiery ashes which engulfed the city.
Warned by some mystic instinct they fled from the doomed region at the first slight tremor of the ground. Even as many animals at Quetta and elsewhere in modern times have foreseen earthquakes and have refused to go indoors on command and have run as far as possible from any impending cave-in.
Yes, ther