and boys are not cruel because they like to see the fight.
They see three of the great cardinal virtues of dog or man--courage,
endurance, and skill--in intense action. This is very different from a
love of making dogs fight, and enjoying, and aggravating, and making
gain by their pluck. A boy, be he ever so fond himself of fighting,
if he be a good boy, hates and despises all this, but he would have
run off with Bob and me fast enough; it is a natural, and a not wicked
interest, that all boys and men have in witnessing intense energy in
action.

Does any curious and finely ignorant woman wish to know how Bob's eye
at a glance announced a dog fight to his brain? He did not, he could
not see the dogs fighting; it was a flash of an inference, a rapid
induction. The crowd round a couple of dogs fighting is a crowd
masculine mainly, with an occasional active, compassionate woman,
fluttering wildly round the outside, and using her tongue and her
hands freely upon the men, as so many "brutes"; it is a crowd annular,
compact, and mobile; a crowd centripetal, having its eyes and its
heads all bent downward and inward to one common focus.

Well, Bob and I are up, and find it is not over; a small,
thoroughbred, white bull-terrier is busy throttling a large shepherd's
dog, unaccustomed to war, but not to be trifled with. They are hard at
it; the scientific little fellow doing his work in great style, his
pastoral enemy fighting wildly, but with the sharpest of teeth and a
great courage. Science and breeding, however, soon had their own; the
Game Chicken, as the premature Bob called him, working his way up,
took his final grip of poor Yarrow's throat--and he lay gasping and
done for. His master, a brown, handsome, big young shepherd from
Tweedsmuir, would have liked to have knocked down any man, would
"drink up Esil, or eat a crocodile," for that part, if he had a
chance: it was no use kicking the little dog; that would only make
him hold the closer. Many were the means shouted out in mouthfuls, of
the best possible ways of ending it. "Water!" but there was none near,
and many cried for it who might have got it from the well at
Blackfriars Wynd. "Bite the tail!" and a large, vague, benevolent,
middle-aged man, more desirous than wise, with some struggle got the
bushy end of Yarrow's tail into his ample mouth, and bit it with all
his might. This was more than enough for the much-enduring,
much-perspiring shepherd, who, with a gle