Hacking was a big, bluff chap with a red face, and not a bit of the Yankee about him, though he was then some ten years over. When he offered me his friendship, and suggested that we could talk better in a warm place, and after a lunch, you may be sure I did not refuse him. My heart and stomach were alike empty. All through my disappointments a stiff upper lip had I kept, but this first bit of kindness was almost too much for me, and I nearly played the woman for all my twenty years. We adjourned to the "Bell-in-hand," where I told as little as possible of my story to him, between alternate mouthfuls of cold beef and swallows of old ale. I confessed to him I was "dead broke," and could find no employment; that is, no employment for which I was fitted. He asked me for what I was fitted, and I told him I was blessed if I knew; that as near as I could discover day labor was about all I was good for. He clapped me on the back with a "Never say die, my lad!" but could think of no suggestion which promised me any relief, and finally invited me to drive home with him. He owned a little inn at Brighton, and promised me food and shelter for a few days until I could "gather myself together." That this very necessary feat could be performed in a "few days" I very much doubted; but the invitation I accepted gratefully, and five o'clock found me sitting beside him on the narrow seat of a light carriage, my portmanteau tied on behind. The road to Brighton was a very decent one, and the big roan mare he drove reeled off the miles in a way that opened my eyes to the possibilities of the trotting horse. I doubt if there was her equal in all England. A clock was striking six when we stopped before the door of the "Traveller's Rest," and I slid off the seat on to the frozen ground, my legs so stiff that I could scarcely walk. It was a large white house, with green blinds, and a piazza with tall white pillars in front. Cosy enough it seemed, too, with its lighted windows and its smell of hot meats; while from the bar in the corner came the sounds of a jingling piano and a good voice singing an Old Country ballad of "Jack and his Susan." I found the inside of the house as comfortable as the outside looked inviting, and it was after a better dinner than I had eaten for many days that I sat with Hacking in a little parlor off the bar, my feet toasting at a coal fire, taking a comforting pipe and an occasional sip of the "necessary." It did not take me long to find that Hacking was most interested in sporting matters, and our conversation gradually harked back to the cracks of the cinder-path who were in their glory when he left Lancashire, ten years before. A little information I gave him about old friends, and then we talked of those who had taken their places, Hacking bewailing the fact that there were none like the "good uns" of the past. "How many men are there to-day," he asked, "who can do the hundred in even time?"