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113 pages

English

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Terhune penned many books about the dogs he kept and trained on the Sunnybank estate throughout the 1920s and 30s.
The Best-Loved Dog Stories of Albert Payson Terhune is a collection of the best of Terhune's dog stories, and selections from his autobiography. One for dog lovers, most of the Sunnybank characters are here.
This early work by Albert Payson Terhune was originally published in 1937 as The Terhune Omnibus then later republished as The Best-Loved Dog Stories of Albert Payson Terhune, we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography.

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Publié par	Read Books Ltd.
Date de parution	15 avril 2014
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781473393134
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0000€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

THE BEST-LOVED
Dog Stories
OF
ALBERT PAYSON TERHUNE
Copyright 2013 Read Books Ltd. This book is copyright and may not be reproduced or copied in any way without the express permission of the publisher in writing
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Albert Payson Terhune
Albert Payson Terhune was born on 21 st December 1872, in New Jersey, United States. Terhune s father was the Reverend Edward Payson Terhune and his mother, Mary Virginia Hawes, was a writer of household management books and pre-Civil War novels under the name Marion Harland. He was one of six children, having four sisters and one brother, but only two of his sisters survived until adulthood. Further tragedy beset the family when his own wife, Lorraine Bryson Terhune, died four days after giving birth to their only child. He later remarried Anice Terhune, but had no more children.
Terhune received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Columbia University in 1893. The following year, he took a job as a reporter at the New York newspaper The Evening World , a position he held for the next twenty years. During this period, he began to publish works of fiction, such as Dr. Dale: A Story Without A Moral (1900), The New Mayor (1907), Caleb Conover, Railroader (1907), and The Fighter (1909). However, it was his short stories about his collie Lad, published in Red Book, Saturday Evening Post, Ladies Home Journal, Hartford Courant , and the Atlantic Monthly , that brought him mainstream success. A dozen of these tales were collected in to novel form and released as Lad: A Dog in 1919. This was a best-seller and in 1962 was adapted into a feature film. He went on to produce over thirty novels focussing on the lives of dogs and enjoyed much success in the genre.
Terhune s interest in canines was by no means restricted to fiction. He became a celebrated dog-breeder, specialising in rough collies, lines of which still exist in the breed today. Sunnybank kennels were the most famous collie kennels in the United States and the estate is now open to the public and known as Terhune Memorial Park. Terhune died on 18 th February 1942 and was buried at the Pompton Reformed Church in Pompton Lakes, New Jersey.
TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION
D OGS IN F ACT AND F ICTION
PART ONE: TO THE BEST OF MY MEMORY, AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY
PART TWO: STORIES OF DOGS
T HE C OWARD
T HE C RITTER
T HE T ARTAR -C ATCHER
T HANE
M AROONED
S EVENTH S ON
H UMAN I NTEREST S TUFF
B ISCUIT
M ANY W ATERS
F AIR E LLEN
THE BEST-LOVED Dog Stories OF ALBERT PAYSON TERHUNE
PART ONE
TO THE BEST OF MY MEMORY
A N A UTOBIOGRAPHY
To the Best of My Memory

Selections from T O THE B EST OF M Y M EMORY and Two Very Real People in P ROVING N OTHING . 1

M Y FATHER was the Rev. Dr. Edward Payson Ter-hune, a clergyman who was also a Man. They used to say in his family that he inherited his vast muscular strength and his physical courage from his grandfather, Abram Terhune, of Washington s bodyguard, whom he resembled greatly in looks and figure.
(You can see a portrait of Abram Terhune in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or in any school book which contains a copy of the painting of Washington Crossing the Delaware. Abram is pulling starboard bow oar, nearest the onlooker. The artist got his description of the picture from him, and painted him in the same position he occupied that December night in Washington s scow. Abram was only a young giant of twenty at the time of the crossing and had not yet attained his lieutenancy. In those days he could stand at one side of a tall horse and make a standing jump over the animal s back without touching the saddle.)
My father was a clergyman of the old school, brought up in a rigid atmosphere of piety and scholarship. He read Latin and Greek and Hebrew as fluently as English. It was a matter of pained wonder to him that none of his children had the remotest liking or talent for any of the mighty dead languages, nor any of his own high claim to classic scholarship.
He was a New Jersey man, as had been his ancestors for two centuries. But when he was graduated from Rutgers and from its Theological Seminary, he went to Virginia to take charge of his first church.
It was there he met my mother.
May I introduce my mother to you, also, as briefly as may be? She is worth your meeting, for she was almost as great in her own way as my father.
When she was fourteen my mother wrote a story, called Marrying Through Prudential Motives . She sent it to a fifty-dollar prize contest that was waging in Godey s Lady s Book . This was in 1845, an era when respectable young girls were no more supposed to write for publication than they were supposed to go into the prize ring.
She did not wish to disgrace her family by writing the tale under her own name, on the off chance that it might be printed and her shame blazoned to the world. So she hit on the pen name that thereafter was hers. Her name was Mary Hawes-Mary Virginia Hawes. She kept the initials of her first and last names and used them for a nom de plume which would sound as much as possible like the original without betraying her identity. Hence she evolved from Mary Hawes the pseudonym Marion Harland.
My mother did not send her address with the story. Six months later she saw in Godey s Lady s Book an announcement that Marion Harland had won the contest s first prize of fifty dollars, and a request that she send her address.
My grandmother lectured her severely and weepingly on the criminal unwomanliness of writing stories, and besought her never again to yield to such an unworthy temptation. For two solid years my mother was so oppressed with a sense of guilt that she did not write another word. She told me those were the two unhappiest years of her life. The strain told on her health. In a moment of confidence she confessed to her father the sinful yearning of her heart to go on writing, and she asked him how best to overcome it.
He demanded that she hunt up any of her stories she might still have kept and show them to him. He spent a whole evening reading them. Late that night he finished the heap of scribbled manuscripts and went up to her room with them. She woke to see him standing at the foot of her bed.
Daughter, said the grim old Presbyterian, you can serve God and mankind as worthily with a gift like yours as you could by going as a missionary to the heathen. God gave you the rare power to write. You would be ungrateful to Him if you neglected it. Go on with your work.
When she was eighteen she finished her first novel, Alone . In Richmond, in the late 1840 s, novel-reading was done in secret, for the most part. Trembling, my mother took Alone to a local publisher. He rejected it. She sent it to a Northern publisher, who sent it back almost by return mail.
Then she told her father what she had done. He read the manuscript all of one business day and late into the night. Next morning he took it to the Richmond publisher who had refused it and bade him issue a goodly edition of it and to send him the bill. My mother told me she lay awake all that night, wondering if her father would get back a penny of his wild investment.
The novel passed the hundred thousand mark, in an age when large book sales were pitiably few. Longfellow and young Aldrich and Whittier and N. P. Willis wrote glowingly congratulatory letters about it to the unknown girl, letters she treasured all her long life.
She and my father met at a dinner in Richmond. Each was twenty-four. Each disliked the other at sight. My father said he had a contempt for women who wrote books. My mother heard of this. She had said she would sooner die than marry a clergyman, and that my father had the ugliest jaw she had seen on a man. (That was nearly twenty years before I was born with a jaw that matched it, line for line.) Kind friends carried this absurd speech to him.
A year later he and she were married.
They came to New Jersey to live-to Newark, which in that day was well-nigh as strait-laced as Richmond.
There, almost at once, my father fell foul of the blue-law folk of his own and other congregations. Not for any sin he committed, but for his belief that a clergyman could be a devout Christian and also a Man. He was a crack shot, an inspired fly-fisherman, a born rider and driver.
He loved fast horses and hunting-dogs, and he kept several of both. One of his church elders felt called upon to reprove the young preacher for his taste for thoroughbred horses and his fondness for fast moving. He said it was unbecoming in a clergyman.
I think I can drive to heaven as well behind a fast horse as behind a slow one, was my father s good-tempered reply. Besides, I can bring down my whip or my fist in front of the nose of any horse of mine, and he won t flinch. He never has been struck. I noticed your horse flung his head up in terror when you reached your hand out to tie him at my gate just now. Perhaps God is as well pleased with a kind horseman who drives fast as with a brutal horseman who drives slowly.
For all his love of athletics and horses and billiards and fishing and shooting, there was nothing of the sensationalist in his sermons. When he entered the pulpit he ceased to be the dashing man-of-the-world and became a sincere and severely zealous preacher.
It was when I was still a small child that my mother s lungs broke down and we went to Europe to stay for several years. She went there expecting to die. Every doctor said so, and on that ground they had advised my father against taking her thither. Stubbornly he had insisted, declaring he was going to bring her back alive and well. His forecast came true. She returned to America at last in splendid health and she remained so for another forty years.
It was before her health broke down that she won another battle in regard to her writing. She was the best housekeeper-except my own wi