Lassie Come-Home = Лессі повертається додому. ENGLISH LIBRARY series / Eric Knight

Everyone in Greenall Bridge knew Sam Carraclough’s Lassie. In fact, you might say that she was the bestknown dog in the village — and for three reasons. First, because nearly every man in the village agreed she was the finest collie he had ever laid eyes on.

This was praise indeed, for Greenall Bridge is in the county of Yorkshire, and of all places in the world it is here that the dog is really king. In that bleak part of northern England the dog seems to thrive as it does nowhere else.

The wind and the cold rains sweep over the flat moorlands, making the dogs rich-coated and as sturdy as the people who live there. The people love dogs and are clever at raising them. You can go into any one of the hundreds of small mining villages in this largest of England’s counties, and see, walking at the heels of humbly clad workmen, dogs of such a fine breed and aristocratic bearing as to arouse the envy of wealthier dog fanciers from other parts of the world.

And Greenall Bridge was like other Yorkshire villages. Its men knew and understood and loved dogs, and there were many perfect ones that walked at men’s heels. But they all agreed that if a finer dog than Sam Carraclough’s tricolour collie had ever been bred in Greenall Bridge, then it must have been long before they were born.