elow the
average. Perhaps he was clever enough to be wilfully stupid; or maybe he
had become so used to following crooked paths that the straight road
seemed to him a place full of suspicion and dread.

In his _Shepherd's Calendar_ Hogg tells several tales of dogs owned by
sheep-stealers, to which he says he cannot attach credit "without
believing the animals to have been devils incarnate, come to the earth
for the destruction of both the souls and bodies of men." And certainly
there was something uncanny, something almost devilish and malevolent,
in the persistency with which they lured their masters on to crime. One
young shepherd, for instance, after long strivings succumbed to the
temptation to steal sheep from a far-distant farm, where at one time he
had been employed. Mounted on a pony, and accompanied by a dog, the
young man arrived at the far-off hill one moon-lit night, mustered the
sheep he meant to steal, and started to drive them towards Edinburgh.
Then, before even he had got them off the farm, conscience awoke--or was
it fear of the consequences?--and he called off his dog, letting the
sheep return to the hill. Congratulating himself on being well out of an
ugly business, he had ridden on his homeward way a matter of three miles
when again and again there came over him an eerie feeling that he was
being followed, though when he looked back nothing was to be seen but
dim moor and hill sleeping in the moonlight. Yet again and again it
returned, that strange feeling, and with it now something like the
whispering of innumerable little feet brushing through bent and heather.
Then came a distant rushing sound and the panting as of an animal sore
spent, and hard on the shepherd's tracks there appeared over a knoll an
overdriven mob of sheep flying before the silent, demoniacal, tireless
energy of his own dog. He had never noticed that the animal had left
him, but now, having once more turned the sheep towards their home, and
severely chid his dog, he resolved that it should not again have the
chance to play him such a trick. For a mile all went well, then suddenly
the beast was gone. Dawn was breaking; he dared not stop where he was,
nor dared to return to meet the dog. All that he could do was to take a
route he was certain his dog did not know, and so would be sure not to
follow, and thus he might abandon the animal to its own devices, hoping
that he himself might not be compromised. For in his own mind he was