These specimens are only scored by specialists.
There is a perfectly distinct difference between a Xanthine, a Red and a Yellow, but it is very small, and to mark it requires a very nicely-trained eye. Xanthines are usually rather bewildered-looking, and are remarkable, in general, for profusion of crop and coarseness of coat.
The habit of insisting on minute colour-niceties is to be deplored as tending to debase the sport to the level of the philatelist’s “rose-red on carmine,” “carmine on rose-red.”
With the exception of George Killingworth, cited on page 25, the most notable Yellow-King of whom we have record is Leo Vincey, the superlative Beaver who went, in company with his dark-brindle guardian, Mr. Holly, in search of “She” ... or should it be “Her”?
There is no record in office of a Yellow-King having been scored in the last eleven years. They are seen occasionally in France, and there are vague rumours that a certain number are bagged yearly in Germany.
Claim extravagant points if you have the fortune to light upon one. Here again sheen is most important, and the coat should be fine, soft and silky.
I, myself, have once scored a Zebra-King, but it was, and is, the only specimen of which I have heard, and it is greatly prized locally.
The colour-demarcation must be very obvious before one can claim a Zebra. There is as much difference between a Yellow and a Red-King as there is between a Zebra and a Brindle.
The King illustrated is--I speak without fear of being contradicted--literally unique. In superb coat, ideal shape of attachment, in colour--a greenish tabby with dark markings, the Zebra I have the pleasure of showing you represents the _ne-plus-ultra_ of rarity.
He thus forms a fitting, as it were, _cul-de-lampe_ to my “littel” guide.
TERMINAL ESSAY ON THE MANNERS AND CUSTOMS OF BEAVERING MEN.
Adam, according to tradition, was created in full King-Beaverhood, and, burgeoning amid the bougainvillea and borage of the Garden of Eden, the Beard, throughout the centuries, has bloomed and faded, resurged, again faded, then blossomed anew that, in the fullness of time, the Beard-Bearer might be crowned with the honourable title of Beaver. “The soft susurrus of his silken stride” brings joy to the heart of man, perhaps also “game, set, match,” and the shape, the colour, the texture of his adornment provoke a fastidious scrutiny akin to that of a connoisseur appraising a Crown Derby figurine. For many years the auburn-haired hero who grew a beard was not, _ipso facto_, a person of any importance. A dignitary of the Church, whose venerable features were complemented or obscured by a snowy, a grizzled or a brindled beard of majestic length, was not, inherently, remarkable. Behold them now, a Red-King and an Ecclesiastical King, cynosures, orchids upon the unlovely tree-trunk of our common life. As the poet might have written:--