Among the large-sized companion "dogs of the day" there can be no doubt of the St. Bernard occupying the position of chief favourite with the public at the present time. The large classes brought together at our principal shows furnish sufficient proof of this; and although I do not accept the decline in the entries of Mastiffs at the Crystal Palace Show, 1878, and again at the Alexandra Palace in 1879, as in itself proof of their fall in popular favour, any more than I take the inferior quality of the exhibits at the former as evidence of the decadence of the breed, yet it is significant that there were nearly seventy entries of St. Bernards to forty of mastiffs in the first case, and over seventy to fifty in the second, and at most leading shows now the former breed is invariably well represented both in numbers and quality.

The history of the St. Bernard in this country is but a short one, and there is no mystery or doubt about the present generation of them as far as their immediate progenitors are concerned; but many of the most illustrious sires we have had, dogs whose blood is destined to influence many future generations, from having begot the grandest of the breed yet seen, are without pedigree, or have merely a sire and dam attributed to them by name, which, for any information it gives, might as well be by Jack, out of Jill. The great ambition seems to be expressed in the constantly repeated phrase, "Descended from the celebrated Barry." There is a degree of indefiniteness about this which should tempt some bold exhibitor to go a step further and bring out one " descended from the celebrated dog of Bernard de Meuthon, sire of the whole illustrious race who lived and begat whelps in the seventh decade of the tenth century."

MR. G. BUSSON DU MAURIER'S ST. BERNARD "CHANG. ' Sire champion Thor (K.C.S.B. 2462) - Dam Countess, by Menthon out of Alp.

Whether the existing dogs are indeed descended more or less directly from the dog of the noble-hearted monk whose name these hospitals and the breed of dogs still bear, and to whose large-heartedness and manly charity they constitute a noble monument, I am unable to say; but, as the portrait of the saint's original dog, still preserved with that of himself at the hospital, is described as a bloodhound, there are more unlikely things; for whatsoever their origin may be, it is an indisputable fact that many specimens, acknowledged to be true St. Bernards, do still exhibit some of the most marked bloodhound characteristics - the red haw, pendulous chops, and throatiness - although these points are not approved when strongly developed. That our present St. Bernards are composed of different and somewhat discordant elements I think they in themselves furnish sufficient evidence, for in large classes we meet with a variety of types that, by pedigree, have an equal claim to be called pure bred.

It appears from the records in the various books on the subject that some half century ago the monks lost all their dogs, they, with several servants, having been swept away by an avalanche, and at that time, according to "Stonehenge," two dogs that the monks had previously given away were returned to them, and from these the existing breed are descended. "Idstone," who wrote from information gleaned on the spot when a guest of the monks, says (writing in 1872): "The breed of St. Bernards has undergone some changes within the last thirty or forty years. A pest or virulent distemper at one time carried off all the dogs of the St. Bernard but one, and that, I believe, was crossed with the Pyrenean wolfhound." "Idstone" doubtless had good ground for making this statement, and possibly to the introduction of the wolfhound cross we may attribute the tendency to a lanky form and elongated muzzle seen in otherwise good specimens.

What other crosses may have been at different times resorted to in the course of nine centuries it is now impossible to say, but it is not likely that strict in-and-in breeding either could or would be adhered to, and no doubt the monks would aim more at preserving the characteristics of strength, courage, endurance of cold, with that high intelligence and docility which, with the special aptitude for tracing buried footways and discovering lost travellers, had been developed by keeping these animals to special work, and all of which qualities were essential to their canine assistants in carrying out their arduous and charitable tasks. "Stone-henge" speaks of a Newfoundland cross having been tried and failed, and even speaks of Mr. Gresham's Monk as having too much of the Newfoundland type. I confess I can see nothing in Monk of the Newfoundland type, if that be the true type of Newfoundland, as I think it is, which "Stonehenge" has given us in the engraving of Mr. Howard Mapplebeck's Leo in his latest work.

In the Rev. J. Cumming Macdona's imported black and tan dog Meu-thon we had something nearer to the Newfoundland type, but perhaps still closer to the Thibet mastiff.

To attempt, then, to trace the pedigrees of our present St. Bernards further than has been done in the Kennel Club Stud Book would be fruitless. We are directed in it to our earlier imported dogs, many of whom had no known pedigree, and to others vaguely referred to as descendants of Barry, a dog that made his name famous by the great number of lives he saved - forty-two according to "Idstone" and "Stonehenge," which, however, under the enthusiastic pen of the Rev. Mr. Macdona, becomes seventy-five.

Be the number of lives saved by Barry more or less, it is impossible for a lover of dogs to refrain from offering a tribute of praise to the noble animal whose life was so beneficently spent, or to withhold generous sympathy with his grandly tragic and yet most becoming death; he died in harness at the ripe old age of fifteen years by the hand of a benighted traveller to whom he was carrying life and hope, and who, mistaking his would-be preserver for a wolf, killed him.