500 PRÆTERITA-III

to me from a young Austrian officer, who had got tired of him,-the Count Thun, who fell afterwards at Solferino. Before the dog was used enough to us, George and I took him to Lido to give him a little sea bath. George was holding him by his forepaws upright among the little crisp breakers. Wisie snatched them out of his hands, and ran at full speed-into Fairyland, like Frederick the Great at Mollwitz.¹ He was lost on Lido for three days and nights, living by petty larceny, the fishermen and cottagers doing all they could to catch him; but they told me he “ran like a hare and leaped like a horse.”

At last, either overcome by hunger, or having made up his mind that even my service was preferable to liberty on Lido, he took the deep water in broad daylight, and swam straight for Venice. A fisherman saw him from a distance, rowed after him, took him, tired among the weeds, and brought him to me-the Madonna della Salute having been propitious to his repentant striving with the sea.

From that time he became an obedient and affectionate dog, though of extremely self-willed and self-possessed character. I was then living on the north side of St. Mark’s Place, and he used to sit outside the window on the ledge at the base of its pillars greater part of the day, observant of the manners and customs of Venice. Returning to England, I took him over the St. Gothard, but found him entirely unappalled by any of the work of Devils on it-big or little. He saw nothing to trouble himself about in precipices, if they were wide enough to put his paws on; and the dog who had fled madly from a crisp sea wave, trotted beside the fall of the Reuss just as if it had been another White Dog, a little bigger, created out of foam.

¹ [“Friedrich’s demeanour, in that disaster of his right wing, was furious despair.... The King vanishes from Mollwitz Field at this point for sixteen hours, into the regions of Myth, ‘into Fairyland,’ as would once have been said” (Carlyle’s Friedrich, Book xii. ch. x.). For another reference to the incident, see A Knight’s Faith, ch. xii. (Vol. XXXI. p. 479).]

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