[ Saunders / Salad for the Social ]
Frederick Saunders (1807 - 1902) was an English writer, librarian, and editor who spent most of his adult life in America.
Salad for the Social, first published in 1856 (New York: DeWitt and Davenport) was a sequel to Saunder's Salad for the Solitary (the two were combined into a single book, with additional material, in 1872). Here's how Saunders explains this book, which is a collection of anecdotes intended for instruction and (intellectual) amusement: "It is odd in its plan and arrangement, consists of odd sayings and selections, from many odd and out-of-the-way authors. It is, moreover, fitted for odd readers, and odd half-hours, and, oddly enough, is the handiwork of a very odd specimen of an author."
There is only one anecdote in this book which mentions Newfoundlands, and it is one which Saunders has adapted (without attribution) from an 1829 book by the Scottish naturalist Thomas Brown, Biographical Sketches and Authentic Anecdotes of Dogs, which is discussed here at The Cultured Newf.
Saunders' version of that anecdote, in which a Newfoundland rescues a drowning child, is as follows:
The Newfoundland dog is known to be superior to most others in the power of swimming, for which it is peculiarly fitted by having the foot partly webbed. Some years ago a nurse was playing with a child on the parapet of a bridge at Dublin; with a sudden spring, the child fell into the river. The agonized spectators saw the waters close over the child, and imagined that it had sunk to rise no more, when a noble dog, seeing the catastrophe, gazed wistfully at the ripple in the stream made by the child's descent, and rushed in to its rescue. At the same instant the poor little thing reappeared on the surface: the dog seized it, and with a firm but gentle pressure, bore it to the shore without injury. Among the spectators attracted to the spot was a gentleman who appeared strongly impressed with admiration for the sagacity and promptness of the dog. On hastening to get nearer to him, he saw, with terror, joy, and surprise, that the child thus rescued was his own! Such was his sense of gratitude, that it is said he offered five hundred guineas for the noble animal. (286)
The above anecdote was actually removed by Saunders from that later combined edition of Salad for the Social and Salad for the Solitary, which has a couple of new anecdotes involving Newfoundlands. That later 'combined' volume is treated separately here at The Cultured Newf.