He had collected a lot of old ewes one night, but had utterly failed, even with “Yarrow’s” help, to get them down a steep hill and across Tweed in the dark.  Accordingly, as usual when day broke, he left the ewes in charge of the dog, and by low-lying ways, where he would be little likely to attract attention, he betook himself home.  From a spot at some distance Millar looked back and for a time watched “Yarrow,” in dead silence, but with marvellous energy, trying to bustle the ewes into the river.  Time and again he would get them to the edge of the pool and attempt to “rush” them in; time and again he failed, and the ewes broke back—­for of all created creatures no breathing thing is so obstinate as an old ewe.  Finally, the dog succeeded in forcing two into the water, but no power on earth could drive the others farther than the brink, and the only result was that by their presence they effectually prevented those already in the water from leaving it, and in the end the two were drowned.  At last “Yarrow” seemed to realise that he was beaten, and that to persevere farther would be dangerous, and he left the ewes and started for home.  The sheep were seen later that day making their way home, all raddled with new keel with which Millar had marked them in a small “stell” which he had passed when the ewes were first collected.

“Faking” the brands, Millar confessed, used to be done by him and his master on a Sunday, in the vault of a neighbouring old peel tower, and at a time when everyone else was at church.  It was easy enough, without exciting suspicion, to run the sheep into the yards on a Saturday night, and thence to the vaults, and no one would ever see the work of altering the buists going on, for “Yarrow” sat outside, and always, by barking, gave timely notice of the approach of any undesirable person.

The report was current in the country after the executions that the dog was hanged at the same time as his master, a rumour probably originated by the hawking about Edinburgh streets of a broadside, entitled the “Last Dying Speech and Confession of the Dog Yarrow.”  In reality “Yarrow” was sold to a farmer in the neighbourhood of Peebles, but, strange to say, though as a thief he had been so supernaturally clever, as a dog employed in honest pursuits his intelligence was much below the average.  Perhaps he was clever enough to be wilfully stupid; or maybe he had become so used to following crooked paths that the straight road seemed to him a place full of suspicion and dread.

In his Shepherd’s Calendar Hogg tells several tales of dogs owned by sheep-stealers, to which he says he cannot attach credit “without believing the animals to have been devils incarnate, come to the earth for the destruction of both the souls and bodies of men.”  And certainly there was something uncanny, something almost devilish and malevolent, in the persistency with which they lured their masters on to crime.  One young shepherd,