Eight-and-forty hours more saw old Isaac stamping drearily about on the wet pavement of that excellent sporting locality. Market Harborough, though perhaps the best head-quarters in the world for fox-hunting, can scarcely be termed a gay or very beautiful town. On a wet, drizzling afternoon in early winter, when twilight begins somewhere about 2.45, with no movable object visible save a deserted carrier’s cart, and a small rain falling, which dulls the red-brick houses while it polishes the paved and slippery streets, it is, doubtless, a city suggestive of repose, not to say stagnation. Isaac’s was a temperament sufficiently susceptible of all unpleasant influences; and he began to wish heartily he hadn’t come. A variety of disadvantages had occurred to him since his arrival. The price of forage and stabling he considered enormous. The conveniences for hot water were not what he was accustomed to at home. Hotspur did by no means feed well in a strange box: the horse had begun to look poorer day by day since he left the dealer’s. And last night The Boy, who had never been from home before, certainly smelt of gin when he came to bed. This youth—who, if he once had a name, must have long forgotten it, since he was never called anything but “The Boy”—was a continual thorn in the head groom’s side. He had originally been taken solely on Isaac’s recommendation, and had caused that worthy more trouble than all the rest of the establishment put together, horses, pigs, and the Cochin-Chinas to boot. He was a light, lathy lad, with a pretty face; a good horseman, considering his strength, or rather weakness; and had a knack of keeping his hands down: but he owned the usual faults of boyhood—carelessness, forgetfulness, “_imperence_” (as Isaac called it), a great love of procrastination, and general insensibility to the beauty of truth. “If he takes to drinking, the young warmint!” thought Isaac, “I’ll larrup the skin off him!” And thus consoling himself, the old man turned his cheek once more to the chill, misty heavens, and shook his head. His horses were done up; the door locked, and the key in his pocket; The Boy also secured by the same means in the loft. Master could not arrive till eight or nine o’clock. It was the hour when, at The Grange, he was accustomed to see the pigs feed and the chickens to roost. He wished he was back in the Old Country: the time hung heavily on the old groom’s hands. “Nothing to do, and lots of time to do it in! that seems to be about the size of it—eh, governor?” said a voice at his elbow; and, turning round, Isaac confronted a short and dapper personage, whom, by a sort of freemasonry, he had no difficulty in recognising as one of his own profession. At any other time he would have treated this worthy’s advances to acquaintance with sovereign contempt; but his spirits were depressed and his heart solitary, so he vented a grunt of acquiescence, which, for him, was wonderfully polite.