Does any curious and finely-ignorant woman wish to know how Bob’s eye at a glance announced a dog-fight to his brain?  He did not, he could not, see the dogs fighting:  it was a flash of an inference, a rapid induction.  The crowd round a couple of dogs fighting is a crowd masculine mainly, with an occasional active, compassionate woman fluttering wildly round the outside and using her tongue and her hands freely upon the men, as so many “brutes;” it is a crowd annular, compact, and mobile; a crowd centripetal, having its eyes and its heads all bent downwards and inwards, to one common focus.

Well, Bob and I are up, and find it is not over:  a small thoroughbred white bull terrier is busy throttling a large shepherd’s dog, unaccustomed to war, but not to be trifled with.  They are hard at it; the scientific little fellow doing his work in great style, his pastoral enemy fighting wildly, but with the sharpest of teeth and a great courage.  Science and breeding, however, soon had their own; the Game Chicken, as the premature Bob called him, working his way up, took his final grip of poor Yarrow’s throat,—­and he lay gasping and done for.  His master, a brown, handsome, big young shepherd from Tweedsmuir, would have liked to have knocked down any man, would “drink up Esil, or eat a crocodile,” for that part, if he had a chance:  it was no use kicking the little dog; that would only make him hold the closer.  Many were the means shouted out in mouthfuls, of the best possible ways of ending it.  “Water!” but there was none near, and many cried for it who might have got it from the well at Blackfriar’s Wynd.  “Bite the tail!” and a large, vague, benevolent, middle-aged man, more desirous than wise, with some struggle got the bushy end of Yarrow’s tail into his ample mouth, and bit it with all his might.  This was more than enough for the much-enduring, much-perspiring shepherd, who, with a gleam of joy over his broad visage, delivered a terrific facer upon our large, vague, benevolent, middle-aged friend,—­who went down like a shot.

Still the Chicken holds; death not far off.  “Snuff! a pinch of snuff!” observed a calm, highly-dressed young buck, with an eye-glass in his eye.  “Snuff, indeed!” growled the angry crowd, affronted and glaring.  “Snuff! a pinch of snuff!” again observes the buck, but with more urgency; whereon were produced several open boxes, and from a mull which may have been at Culloden he took a pinch, knelt down, and presented it to the nose of the Chicken.  The laws of physiology and of snuff take their course; the Chicken sneezes, and Yarrow is free!

The young pastoral giant stalks off with Yarrow in his arms, comforting him.

But the Bull Terrier’s blood is up, and his soul unsatisfied; he grips the first dog he meets, and discovering she is not a dog, in Homeric phrase, he makes a brief sort of amende, and is off.  The boys, with Bob and me at their head, are after him:  down Niddry Street he goes, bent on mischief; up the Cowgate like an arrow,—­Bob and I, and our small men, panting behind.