ck, vim, nerve force; call it what you like, and there is no
created thing that has more of it than the dog.

The blood-lust is a dog-phase that has never been quite understood.
Every station-owner knows that sometimes the house-dogs are liable to
take a sudden fit of sheep-killing. Any kind of dog will do it, from the
collie downward. Sometimes dogs from different homesteads meet in the
paddocks, having apparently arranged the whole affair beforehand. They
are very artful about it, too. They lie round the house till dark, and
then slink off and have a wild night's blood-spree, running down the
wretched sheep and tearing their throats open; before dawn they
slink back again and lie around the house as before. Many and many a
sheep-owner has gone out with a gun and shot his neighbour's dogs for
killing sheep which his own wicked, innocent-looking dogs had slain.

CONCERNING A STEEPLECHASE RIDER

Of all the ways in which men get a living there is none so hard and so
precarious as that of steeplechase-riding in Australia. It is bad enough
in England, where steeplechases only take place in winter, when the
ground is soft, where the horses are properly schooled before being
raced, and where most of the obstacles will yield a little if struck and
give the horse a chance to blunder over safely.

In Australia the men have to go at racing-speed, on very hard ground,
over the most rigid and uncompromising obstacles--ironbark rails clamped
into solid posts with bands of iron. No wonder they are always coming
to grief, and are always in and out of hospital in splints and bandages.
Sometimes one reads that a horse has fallen and the rider has "escaped
with a severe shaking."

That "shaking", gentle reader, would lay you or me up for weeks, with
a doctor to look after us and a crowd of sympathetic friends calling to
know how our poor back was. But the steeplechase-rider has to be out and
about again, "riding exercise" every morning, and "schooling" all sorts
of cantankerous brutes over the fences. These men take their lives in
their hands and look at grim death between their horses' ears every time
they race or "school".

The death-record among Australian cross-country jockeys and horses is
very great; it is a curious instance of how custom sanctifies all things
that such horse-and-man slaughter is accepted in such a callous way. If
any theatre gave a show at which men and horses were habitually crippled
or killed in fu