temperate people, but there is much salt in the air.

Our dogs are very like ourselves, as peaceable and well-conducted as can
be, except when some rascal takes up their challenge and makes faces at
them or trails a tail of too much pretension and too suddenly in their
neighbourhood. Then the fur is apt to fly.

"What a degrading spectacle a dog-fight is!" Moriarty, who takes up the
collection in church and has thus a semi-ecclesiastical status in life,
which shows itself in his speech, said this to me only last evening.
There were about a hundred of us trying to hide this degrading spectacle
from the police and other innocent people, and Moriarty had just lost
three-and-sixpence on Casey's dog. "A degrading spectacle indeed," said
I. "If Casey's dog had held out two minutes longer he had the other dog
beat. I am disappointed in Casey's dog." It _was_ degrading, and I am
glad I had only half-a-crown on it. So I paid up to our collector of
rates and taxes and came home.

This little incident made me think of Billy O'Brien, our next-door
neighbour. Billy had one passion in life, and that was the rearing of a
dog that could whip any combination in the vicinity.

Billy said life wasn't worth living if he could not walk in the streets
without some neighbour's dog beating his. Billy had failed hitherto, and
this is not surprising to one who knows the dogs of Ballybun. They are
Irish terriers to a dog, and all of them living instances of the
doctrine of the survival of the fittest. The air of Ballybun is bad for
a dog with a weak chest who thinks he has a strong one. Billy
experimented with many breeds and had many glimpses of success, but a
Ballybun dog always put an end to his experiments.