An Ulm

"IT is as you say; he is not handsome, certainly not beautiful as
flowers and the stars and a woman are but he has another sort of
beauty, I think, such a beauty as made Victor Hugo's monster,
Gwynplaine, fascinating, or gives a certain sort of charm to a banded
rattlesnake. He is not much like the dove-eyed setter over whom we
shot woodcock this afternoon, but to me he is the fairest object on
the face of the earth, this gaunt brindled Ulm.

"What is there about an Ulm especially attractive? Well, I don't know.
About Ulms in the abstract, very little, I imagine. About an Ulm in
the concrete, particularly the brute near us a great deal. The Ulm is
a morbid development in dog-breeding, anyhow. I remember, as doubtless
you do as well, when the animals first made their appearance in this
country a few years ago. The big, dirty-white beasts, dappled with
dark blotches and with countenances unexplainably threatening,
reminded one of hyenas with huge dog forms. Germans brought them over
first, and they were affected by saloon-keepers and their class. They
called them Siberian blood-hounds then, but the dog-fanciers got hold
of them, and they became, with their sinister obtrusiveness, a feature
of the shows; the breed was defined more clearly, and now they are
known as Great Danes or Ulms, indifferently. How they originated I
never cared to learn. I imagine it sometimes. I fancy some jilted,
jaundiced descendant of the sea-rovers, retiring to his castle, and
endeavouring, by mating some ugly bloodhound with a wild wolf, to
produce a quadruped as fierce and cowardly and treacherous as a man or
woman may be.