Bruce

She was beautiful. And she had a heart and a soul-which were a curse. For without such a heart and soul, she might have found the tough life-battle less bitterly hard to fight. But the world does queer things-damnable things-to hearts that are so tenderly all-loving and to souls that are so trustfully and forgivingly friendly as hers. Her pedigree name was Rothsay Lass. She was a collie-daintily fragile of build, sensitive of nostril, furrily tawny of coat. Her ancestry was as flawless as any in Burke’s Peerage. If God had sent her into the world with a pair of tulip ears and with a shade less width of brain-space she might have been cherished and coddled as a potential bench-show winner, and in time might even have won immortality by the title of CHAMPION Rothsay Lass. But her ears pricked rebelliously upward, like those of her earliest ancestors, the wolves. Nor could manipulation lure their stiff cartilages into drooping as bench-show fashion demands. The average show-collie’s ears have a tendency to prick. By weights and plasters, and often by torture, this tendency is overcome. But never when the cartilage is as unyielding as was Lass’s. Her graceful head harked back in shape to the days when collies had to do much independent thinking, as sheep-guards, and when they needed more brainroom than is afforded by the borzoi skull sought after by modern bench-show experts. - Taken from Bruce written by Albert Payson Terhune