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The First Lassie Story. This was the first full length book I ever read (to myself, as opposed to having it read to me). I was eight. Now, returning to it shortly after my 60th birthday, I find it a treasure, every bit as good as I remember it.It was largely a result of my reading this book that I grew up with collies, three of them in my formative years, and having some experience of them, I was doubtful if the plot of this book was really to be taken at face value. But, reading it again, I find myself swallowing it whole. The great strength of it is that it is told from the point of view of the main character, Lassie the dog. Without gimmicks such as first person narrative, it proceeds to explain what she must have felt, how she decided what to do, and what drove her to undertake something that was impossible on its face - a 400 mile journey on her own paws to reunite with her beloved master. The author/narrator, whom I imagine as a gray-bearded Professor Emeritus from the University of Glasgow (only a Scotsman could understand collies so well, in my admittedly biased view), patiently explains his conclusions, as to a child: she could not reason her way out of trouble and couldn't learn from maps or other creatures how far it was. She knew only that she had to pick her master up at school at four o'clock. She knew what time it was and she knew what direction to go, because she had instinct - something we don't have and don't really understand. She knew when she got hungry, but for her, food was something a human put in front of her every day at a set time; she has to learn somehow to find it for herself. To put yourself into the mind-set of a very different kind of creature than you is hard even to imagine, and for someone who has observed collies at close range some of the author's conclusions are not entirely convincing, but nevertheless they hang together beautifully. If instinct had told her everything, perhaps she would have been daunted by the distance and by how long it would take to traverse it.Some things are not the same as I remember. Somehow, what childhood memory has always said was the Duke of Rutland (like Rutland, Vermont) is actually Rudling. Of all the human characters, only one of them is a bad person. The Duke is a kindly old gentleman who adores his granddaughter, Priscilla; he's practically deaf and that's why he shouts at people. He wants well-bred dogs to win ribbons at shows, a harmless hobby for someone of substantial means. Sam Carraclough, the dog's owner's father, is a coal miner who has lost his job as the Great Depression grinds its way through the wealth of ages; he's a man of unshakeable integrity who gives his son a valuable lecture on honesty. Joe, the son, just doesn't understand why his world is suddenly spinning down into chaos so that the family can't afford any frills, and he wants Lassie back partly because she represents the secure world he had before the mine closed. Priscilla sees him tell Lassie to stay at the Duke's kennel and not to run away any more, knowing from his tone of voice that he wants her back desperately, and she sympathizes, which is why she deliberately helps Lassie escape at the start of her adventure. It does not appear that the author recognized that World War I and the Depression had also doomed the Duke and all his kind, and Priscilla might not get to enjoy his estates for long once he'd died. Only Hines, the Duke's kennel master, is a vindictive man who treats Lassie and the Carracloughs with suspicion and resentment.An adult reading this book can also see a subtext not as visible to children. Of the people Lassie meets in her odyssey, some of them are unsavory but some of them are good enough that she is tempted to stay with them. The pottery pedlar and the elderly couple who nurse her back to health after she nearly dies of the challenges of the journey, particularly, are people she could easily just adopt as her own. I doubt if a real dog could have been so profoundly attached to her previous owner that she could resist this temptation. But, Lassie, like Sam Carraclough, is a straight arrow with boundless loyalty and a will of adamant. As soon as she realizes her human friends aren't taking her closer to home, she leaves, always going south, crossing rivers and mountains and surmounting all difficulties, until with the last of her strength she staggers into the schoolyard at exactly 4 PM to meet Joe.Lassie Come-Home was first published in 1938 as a short story, oddly enough, in the US, then in 1940 in its present form. By that time the Depression was over and World War II had broken out. I guess the British public needed a canine heroine more than ever. The book's British origin is a little more problematic in my old age than it was in childhood. Because it is set in a (probably fictional) Yorkshire village, Greenall Bridge, the author has the characters sometimes speak in the local dialect. For many Americans, a Yorkshire dialect is completely unfamiliar and ...