Soon after this, happening to meet her brother-in-law, who was an old resident in the neighbourhood, she asked him who was the owner of a particularly large black dog, describing where she had seen it. The brother-in-law, listening with a rather queer expression, answered, "So you have seen that dog! Then, according to tradition, either you or your friend will die before six months are past. That was a ghost-dog you saw; it has appeared to several other people before now, and always forebodes death."
Mrs. Hudson did not pay much attention to what she considered a very superstitious explanation of a trivial occurrence, feeling perfectly certain that what she had seen was a real animal. But it was an explanation she recalled with a feeling of horror, when within six months of the date of that walk, her friend most unexpectedly died. The curious point in this experience is, of course, that the phantom dog was visible to only one of the two friends, and that not the one for whom the warning was intended.
As I have before remarked, there still lingers in some parts of Wales a breath of that atmosphere of fairyland and romance which, to anybody possessing imagination, gives a peculiar value to ideas and beliefs that in less inspiring surroundings would be classed as unmixed superstition by people of common sense. So that the explanation given to a certain Mr. Blair--who was partly of Highland extraction, and therefore possessed something of the Celtic temperament--of a singular little adventure that befell him in Wales, did not seem to him at all far-fetched at the time, but rather the one most appropriate, and quite characteristic of the country. Business obliged Mr. Blair to live some years in this particular Welsh valley, and often, after dinner in the summer, he would cross the river, and walk up the opposite hill to a house called Wernddhu where some friends lived, and spend the evening with them. From Wernddhu a narrow, steep road led down to the bottom of the hill, where it ended; and from this point, a grass lane led up in the direction of a farm.
In the twilight of a certain beautiful evening Mr. Blair left Wernddhu, and started to walk home. He had his dog, a spaniel, with him, and as he descended the hill and reached the place from which the grass lane diverged, he noticed his dog, who was running in front, suddenly lie down and begin to whine. And then he saw that there was another dog, a big Scotch collie, gambolling and playing round the spaniel, though where it had come from he could not imagine, as he was sure that no strange dog had followed him from Wernddhu. But as he walked up to the two animals, his own still whining and shivering, the other suddenly darted away and disappeared up the lane that led to the farm, much to the apparent relief of the spaniel, who immediately seemed to forget his fright, and became quite lively again. Blair continued his homeward way, wondering to whom the collie belonged, as he did not remember having seen it anywhere about before. But the incident, slight though it was, somehow made a decided impression on his mind, so much so, that he could not forbear mentioning it next day to his old landlady, remarking that he supposed they must have got a new dog at Nantgwyn--the farm to which the grass lane referred to eventually led. Mrs. Morgan asked him what the dog was like, and when told, she exclaimed, "Why, indeed, Mr. Blair, you must have seen the Nantgwyn Dog!" She said it was no creature of flesh and blood, but an apparition which had appeared to other people at different times. The story went that many years ago, a tramp had been found lying dead on the very spot where Blair had seen the collie, and it was always thought that the dog, when living, must have belonged to him, and with the devotion characteristic of its kind, had continued faithful, even after death.