Tenderly not scornfully,
Render praise and favour!
With my hand upon his head,
Is my benediction said
Therefore, and for ever.
The allusion to the "other dogs in thymy dew" who "tracked the hare," is suggested by an incident told the poetess by Miss Mitford in one of her chatty letters. This lady's spaniel, the sire of the second "Flush" does not appear to have been, at all times, so sedate as his daughter. One evening, when his mistress was taking her wonted walk, the one daily walk which she said kept her alive, her Flush found a hare and quested it for two miles. She says—
I heard him the whole time, and could follow by the ear every step that they took, and called in desperate fear lest some keeper should kill my pet. To be sure, as Ben (her servant) and my father said when I returned and told my fright, "Flush is too well known for that." But you can comprehend my alarm at finding that the more I called, the more Flushie would not come; whilst he was making the welkin ring with a tongue unrivalled amongst all spaniels that ever followed game. Instead of pitying me, both my father and Ben were charmed at the adventure. The most provoking part of it was that when, after following the hare to a copse on the other side of the avenue, he had at length come back to me, he actually, upon crossing the scent again, as we were returning homeward, retraced his steps and followed the game back to cover again. This, which was the most trying circumstance of all to me, was exactly what, as proving the fineness of his nose, Ben and his master gloried in. Indeed, Ben caught him up in his arms, and declared that he would back him against any spaniel in England for all that he was worth in the world. So, I suppose, to-morrow he'll run away again.
In further proof of the value of the Flush family, Miss Mitford, on another occasion, recounts how a half sister of Miss Barrett's Flush "is so much admired in Reading that she has already been stolen four times—a tribute to her merit which might be dispensed with
