Even when the hare did not cross her path, her horn, imitating the professional toot, would allure and misguide the distant dogs. Nip’s own relatives, the foxhounds, more rarely came his way, but though his mistress’s sympathies with the quarry were less marked—her chickens being precious—Nip was still held in. But amid all his disgust the cunning dog remembered that his days of foraging for himself—before he had picked up Jinny—had not been rosy and replete: caterers like Jinny, he realized, did not grow on every cart, not to mention the cushioned basket from which he could bark at everything on the road, or within which, with a huge grunt of satisfaction, he could curl into an odorous dream. A contrast in all save colour was the stolid Methusalem, though he too was of hybrid stock. While his hairy fetlocks proclaimed a kinship with the draught-breed of the shire, he lacked that gross spirit, and while his flying mane and tail flaunted an affinity with the fiery Arab, he was equally deficient in that high mettle. By what romantic episode he had come into being, whether through the wild oats of an Arabian ancestor, or the indiscretion of a mere circus-horse, or whether his tossing hair and tail were the heritage from a Shetland pony—as his moderate stature suggested—is not recorded in any stud-book. But it was impossible to see him without the word “steed” coming into the mind, and equally impossible to sit behind him without thinking of a plough-horse. “When Oi first see that rollin’ in the brook afore ’twas broke in,” Gaffer Quarles would relate, “Oi was minded of the posters of Mazeppa at the Fair, and christened that accordin’.” It was only when he discovered that this blonde beast was a whited sepulchre, that “Mazeppa” was exchanged for “Methusalem,” as though that antediluvian worthy had always been a doddering millenarian, and not at one time in the prime of his hundreds. The name had at least the effect of banishing expectation; his mere amble was an agreeable surprise. As a matter of fact Methusalem had still his Mazeppa moments. They came on Tuesday and Friday evenings when he was loosed from the shafts; at which moments he would roll on his back, kick up his heels and gallop madly round the goat-pasture to the alarm of the tethered browsers. And even at his professional pace he always kept his mane flying. One accomplishment, however, Methusalem had which no “Mazeppa” steed could have bettered, nay, which made a circus pedigree plausible. He could lift the latch of gates with his nose and walk through. It was a trick which Jinny, with her habit of not alighting, had fostered in him: if the gate did not swing to, she could usually close it with the butt-end of her whip—through the cart-rear at the worst—a procedure which, with her further habit of using short cuts and even private tracks like that at Bellropes Park, saved not a little time, and was some compensation for Methusalem’s general crawl.