In the course of time the hostler came to lead the new horse out, in the deepening twilight, to show him to some visitors. The interest True took in the performance, one could be reasonably certain, was not on account of the visitors, but because he was well aware of his splendid father’s interest and admiration. That night when all was quiet the old war-horse said: “You are like your mother, my son, I remember her well--and a fine, noble mare she was, to be sure. Her hoof beat music from the path and she struck the road with the same nervous tread that I see you have--as a pigeon in full career repulses the air. She scoffed at hills and mounted them with a dash of spirited flight, as if she joyed in their difficulties.” True recalled his mother’s admiration of his father, and his heart beat gratefully at these words. He, too, remembered Gipsey’s poetic motion, her rhythmic step, as if she trod an even melody, and her willingness to take a hill. * * * * * “As his name is, so is he, If you believe not, come and see!” So _The Hartford Courant_ described Beautiful Bay, and the rhyme was a by-word about the town--for they were very proud of Beautiful Bay in Hartford. It was not long before True heard the couplet in the stables, and right proud was he to be the son of so praised a father. Beautiful Bay told True many stirring tales in the quiet nights they spent so close together, for the older horse had ever been a “soldier of Fortune” and his life one of constant change and excitement. It was a great boast for a horse to say he had been bred in the De Lancey stables, for those De Lanceys, like Mahommed, had been lovers of horses, and their stables and half-mile running track, in the centre of what was so soon to be the very heart of the great city of New York, was the finest in the Northern Colonies before the War of the Revolution. Gay blades were those De Lanceys, and their rightful inheritance was the sporting blood of old England, though they were, after all, part Huguenot, part Dutch, by ancestry. Colonel De Lancey, True Briton’s first owner, had married a Mistress Van Courtlandt, whose family had a King and a Bishop at their backs, and occupied half the important posts under the crown. He was a rollicking, generous, reckless gentleman, at home alike in drawing room or on the course, but when, through stress of circumstances, this British officer had to change his mode of living, there was a sale of his horses at John Fowler’s Tavern, near the Tea-Water Pump, in Bowery Lane. All the favorites went but his especial saddle horse, True Briton--who now frankly admitted to his son his worth and beauty in those days. Indeed, he seemed to have no _false modesty_ about it at all, and confessed his superiority over all his stable-mates, even though among them there were such horses as Lath and Slamerkin.