Eloise and I had always enjoyed riding over The Home Stretch with Aunt Lucretia. Since I could remember she had ridden the same horse, a great raw-boned sorrel pacer, full seventeen hands high, and so powerful that he carried my aunt, large woman though she was, as if she had been a child. "His beauty is in his gait," she used to say; "there is but one saddle gait fit for business, and that is the nodding fox-trot, and Tempest has that perfectly." It was amusing to watch them in action. With his head down and nodding with every stride, Tempest seemed fairly to butt his way into space, reeling off the miles like a great machine in motion, and Aunt Lucretia, in her great, high-pommeled side saddle, double girthed and double decked, sat him as comfortably as if she were in her rocker. Her saddle-bags, thrown over the saddle, were in themselves unusual, for they held everything needed in an emergency on the farm. In one pocket were the hatchet and nails, for she never rode by a loose plank but she nailed it on again, and in the other were her medicines, everything needed on the farm from a hypodermic syringe to a package of salts. The day after I came home I rode over the farm with her. "It’s good to ride Little Sister," I said, stroking her crest. "What a beautiful saddle mare she has made." "Eloise did it," said my Aunt. "Jack, do you know she was always foolish about that mare after you left?" She squared her big horse up to me. "Jack," she whispered, "I don’t believe in the stuff, of course. It is all foolishness and not fit to marry on, but there is a great vein of sentiment in that girl in spite of her make-believe and her indifference. After you left she wouldn’t ride anything but that mare and I knew it was because of you, and the clever way you did up those two old braggarts of ours in that race." "Did she, Aunt Lucretia?"