"Take him on? He took me on," returned the discomfited equestrian. "All right, I'll remember that groom, Wilkins, or rather, I won't remember him. 'Just throw your leg over Harlequin, sir,' he says, 'and take him over the turf!' Now, old man, I should describe that animal, from a safe distance, as an inferior plater; but when I got up my feeling of contempt changed to one of respect--it usually does. On foot I'm pretty familiar with horses; once on their back I feel as though I had not been properly introduced. Well, I mounted in best jockey style; I haven't shelled out for the saddling paddock for nothing. 'Me up,' says I, just waking him up with the whip. Next moment it was me--down, and instead of putting him over the turf, he very nearly put me under it. I don't think you could have passed a five-pound note between his hind hoof and my front teeth. His near plate was so near that my jaw was almost off." "Good job it wasn't," observed Gage, wondering how much such a catastrophe would have affected his enjoyment of the pleasures of the peerage. "You're right. Well, the fellows were grinning; so, thinks I, if the horse won't be beaten, no more will I. So I ups into the pigskin again, and tries the soothing system." "Did that do better?" "Slightly. The animal began to feel quite comfortable, and after a bit sat down." "Sat down?" laughed Gage. "What became of you?" "Well, I don't know," answered Peckover, with rueful humour, "whether it has ever struck you, in Tasmania or elsewhere, that it is a difficult thing for a horse and its rider both to sit down at the same time. You see, there is no back to the saddle, so I just slid down over the tail, with as much side as I could put on, and then footed it off. It's all very well for you to laugh, my lord," he remonstrated, as the other man's guffaws grew exasperating, "but it would take you all your time to keep your back stiff when the horse under you is sitting up like a cat, and the back of his head trying to play the castanets with your front teeth. Harlequin? He's a regular pantomime rally." "I shouldn't wonder," suggested Gage, "if he was called Harlequin, because he'll jump through anything." "Dare say!" replied Peckover dryly. "No doubt he'd have tried jumping through a brick wall if I'd stayed there long enough. No, thank you. I prefer seeing these little funniments from the top of the Grand Stand, not from the top of the performer." CHAPTER XIII "Can't say I notice much family likeness, old man." Peckover had been enjoying the novelty of a contemplative cigarette in the ancestral picture gallery of the Quorns, and was there surprised by Gage who had stood for a while silently comparing the portraits of dead and gone Quorns, in all stages of costume and self-consciousness, with the cheap, up-to-date cockney swell who sprawled in a great chair of state before them. "I guess they didn't pick you out in Australia by the family mug."