This animal was one of the smallest of his family, and of a color
uncommon among them; for they are mostly either of a yellowish dun, or
of that slaty mouse-color known among dog-fanciers as "blue,"--a tint,
by the way, particularly appropriate for a dog of Skye. Sometimes they
are black; but Sambo, better known to his familiars as Sam, was of a
sooty brindle, with a very dark muzzle, and eyes burning out like black
stars from the cloud of shaggy hair that mantled upon his brow. Next to
the shortness of his legs, the length of his body was one of the most
remarkable physical freaks I remember to have observed; neither of
these attributes, however, having a chance of notice in comparison with
the quantity and denseness of his long, soft hair,--for the coat of a
true Skye dog is fleecy, rather than wiry. It was the joint result of
the shortness of his legs and the length of his beard that the fatter
appendage continually swept the ground,--an inconvenience which I once
undertook to remedy by trimming it off short with scissors. No Turk
could have more indignantly resented the process than did that small
quadruped,--his Celtic feelings being so severely wounded by it, in
fact, that he abstained from sustenance for three days, putting himself
into moral sackcloth and ashes for that period by retiring into his
penitential cell under a chest of drawers.
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