And so, despite Mr. Skindle’s offer to nurse it on his knees, she put him behind her—not as a Satan, for his seductiveness was small. He had, it is true, a good styside manner, and his slim figure, outlined by a trimly cut pepper-and-salt suit, effused a sense of vitality. But his straw-coloured moustache, which was not without its female votaries, was for Jinny more of a puzzle than a decoration, for she could not reconcile its flowingness with the desolating baldness that any shifting of his cap revealed. His cranium was, in fact, like the advertisement of a hair-restorer in the picture preceding the application thereof. As fixed a feature of his face as the grey cap which concealed his calvity was the black cutty pipe stuck in his stained teeth, nor had Jinny ever seen him without a large pearl horseshoe pin in his tie. “Please don’t smoke,” she said, as he climbed in by the tail-board, “Gran’fer would smell it.” “And why shouldn’t he?” “He’s a Wesleyan.” “Oh!” He laughed without comprehension, a shade scoffingly. “And the smell might get into people’s parcels,” she added. Bestowing himself under the tilt as well as he could on a box, grazed at his side by a ledge he considered too narrow to sit on, and threatened with decapitation through a plank holding the smaller parcels that ran athwart the cart just above his head, Mr. Skindle gazed up over this shelf at the glorious view of the back of Jinny’s bonnet and feasted his eyes on her graceful dorsal curves and the more variegated motions of her driving arm, not to mention the succession of lovely rural backgrounds made for her figure by the arch of the awning. And his ill-humour melted, and though his pipe grew cold his heart began to glow. But Jinny took no more notice of him than if he had been himself a box. No wonder he began to feel closed and corded up, bursting though he knew himself to be with soul-riches. For a full mile, his extinct pipe in his teeth, he heard only the monotonous snap of Methusalem’s hoofs as if everything along the road was snapping in a frost. The unjaded steed had actually started off at almost a trot, and as the Gaffer explained once, “a hoss what has long lopes knocks his fitten together.” Then—as if to mark how completely her passenger was forgotten—one of her grandfather’s songs began to steal from her lips. It was not “High Barbary” nor “Admiral Benbow,” nor yet his favourite “Oi’m seventeen come Sunday,” which the nonagenarian sang daily with growing conviction. It was—and Nip would have been the first to be surprised, had he understood it—the old English air: _The hunt is up, the hunt is up, and it is wellnigh day,_ _And Harry our King has gone huntynge, to bring the deer to bay._