When Don Adriano de Armado, the fantastical Spaniard of "Love's Labour's Lost," admits that he is "ill at reckoning," and cannot tell "how many is one thrice told," his page Moth observes "how easy it is to put years to the word three, and study three years in two words, the dancing horse will tell you." This is without doubt an allusion to a horse called Marocco, trained by its master, one Banks, a Scotchman, to perform various strange tricks. Marocco, a young bay nag of moderate size, was exhibited in Shakespeare's time in the courtyard of the Belle Sauvage Inn, on Ludgate Hill, the spectators lining the galleries of the hostelry. A pamphlet, published in 1595, and entitled "Maroccos Exstaticus, or Bankes Bay Horse in a Traunce; a Discourse set down in a Merry Dialogue between Bankes and his Beast," contains a wood-print of the performing animal and his proprietor. Banks's horse must have been one of the earliest "trained steeds" ever exhibited. His tricks excited great amazement, although they would hardly now be accounted very wonderful. Marocco could walk on his hind legs, and even dance the Canaries. At the bidding of his master he would carry a glove to a specified lady or gentleman, and tell, by raps with his hoof, the numbers on the upper face of a pair of dice. He went through, indeed, much of what is now the regular "business" of the circus horse. In 1600 Banks amazed London by taking his horse up to the vane on the top of St. Paul's Cathedral. Marocco visited Scotland and France, and in these countries his accomplishments were generally attributable to witchcraft. Banks rashly encouraged the notion that his nag was supernaturally endowed. An alarm was raised that Marocco was possessed by the Evil One. To relieve misgivings and escape reproach, Banks made his horse pay homage to the sign of the cross, and called upon all to observe that nothing satanic could have been induced to perform this act of reverence. A rumour at one time prevailed that the horse and his master had both, as "subjects of the Black Power of the world," been burned at Rome by order of the Pope. More authentic accounts, however, show Banks as surviving to Charles I.'s time, and thriving as a vintner in Cheapside. But it is to be gathered from Douce's "Illustrations of Shakespeare," that of old certain performing horses suffered miserably for their skill. In a little book, "Le Diable Bossu," Nancy, 1708, allusion is made to the burning alive at Lisbon, in 1707, of an English horse, whose master had taught him to know the cards; and Grainger, in his "Biographical History of England," 1779, states that, within his remembrance, "a horse, which had been taught to perform several tricks, was, with its owner, put into the Inquisition."