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He was sitting in a melancholy grove of old trees, that slants gently westward. Exactly the same odd effect of light I have before described  a faint red glow reflected downward from the upper sky, after the sun had set, now gave to the growing darkness a lurid uncertainty. This grove, which lies in a gentle hollow, owing to its circumscribed horizon on all but one side, has a peculiar character of loneliness.

He got up and peeped over a sort of barrier, accidentally formed of the trunks of felled trees laid one over the other, and saw the dog straining up the other side of it, and hideously stretched out, his ugly head looking in consequence twice the natural size. His dream was coming over him again. And now between the trunks the brute’s ungainly head was thrust, and the long neck came straining through, and the body, twining after it like a huge white lizard; and as it came striving and twisting through, it growled and glared as if it would devour him.

As swiftly as his lameness would allow, the squire hurried from this solitary spot towards the house. What thoughts exactly passed through his mind as he did so, I am sure he could not have told. But when the dog came up with him it seemed appeased, and even in high good humor, and no longer resembled the brute that haunted his dreams.

That night, near ten o’clock, the squire, a good deal agitated, sent for the keeper, and told him that he believed the dog was mad, and that he must shoot him. He might shoot the dog in the gun room, where he was  a grain of shot or two in the wainscot did not matter, and the dog must not have a chance of getting out.

The squire gave the gamekeeper his double-barreled gun, loaded with heavy shot. He did not go with him beyond the hall. He placed his hand on the keeper’s arm; the keeper said his hand trembled, and that he looked "as white as curds. "

"Listen a bit!" said the squire under his breath.

They heard the dog in a state of high excitement in the room  growling ominously, jumping on the window stool and down again, and running round the room.

"You’ll need to be sharp, mind  don’t give him a chance  slip in edgeways, d’ye see? and give him both barrels!"

"Not the first mad dog I’ve knocked over, sir," said the man, looking very serious as he cocked the gun.

As the keeper opened the door, the dog had sprung into the empty grate. He said he "never see sich a stark, staring devil. " The beast made a twist round, as if, he thought, to jump up the chimney  "but that wasn’t to be done at no price"  and he made a yell  not like a dog  like a man caught in a mill-crank, and before he could spring at the keeper, he fired one barrel into him. The dog leaped towards him, and rolled over, receiving the second barrel in his head, as he lay snorting at the keeper’s feet!

"I never seed the like; I never heard a screech like that!" said the keeper, recoiling. "It makes a fellow feel queer. "

"Quite dead?" asked the squire.

"Not a stir in him, sir," said the man, pulling him along the floor by the neck.

"Throw him outside the hall door now," said the squire; "and mind you pitch him outside the gate tonight  old Cooper says he’s a witch," and the pale squire smiled, "so he shan’t lie in Gylingden. "