“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.

Last year Billy thought he had achieved his aim at last.  When he returned from the sea-side he brought with him a powerful dog of unknown breed and of the most colossal ugliness.  He confided to me that he would not let him out on the street until his education was complete, “and then,” said he, “there will be only one dog in the Ballybun census.”  I had my doubts, as I know the local dog, which would have the hide off an elephant if it barked.  But Billy O’Brien is a stranger, or as we say “transplanter” in our part of Ireland, his grandfather being the first of his branch to transplant himself here, and he did not then know much about the higher education of dog, though he is an admirable inspector of schools.

But he thought he did, and he had an educational theory which was all his own.  He claimed that a dog is what he eats, and he simply spent pounds on that dog’s education.  In a month or two Elixir, which was the dog’s name, could swallow curries without winking which would bring tears to the eyes of an Oriental Potentate, and he would howl if he was given water without Worcester Sauce.

O’Brien’s theory may have been right, or else it was only his dog’s liver that was wrong, for very soon Elixir would keep us up half the night shouting offensive epithets across our wall at Mulligan’s dog, who hurled them back at him.  Mulligan, who is a light sleeper, was much annoyed, and wrote O’Brien eight pages about it.  He mentioned that he was a member of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and that it