Mr. Sawyer thought of the roan, and ran his eye over his friend’s slim figure and horsemanhorseman-like shape. “He’d carry him like a bird,” thought the owner, “and I shouldn’t mind letting him have him for two hundred, or say, if I dropped into a good thing with him, two hundred and _fifty_;” but he only observed, “I suppose you are _very_ well mounted yourself?” “So-so,” was the reply. “I’m rather short just now; only ten. Good useful brutes some of them; but I shouldn’t say _my_ lot was quite first-class, by any means!” Again Mr. Sawyer found subject for rumination. Ten! Only ten! and not first-class ones neither, though it was probable that a man who had ten hunters in his stable would not find it worth while to keep a bad one; and then he thought of his own three, and the severe infliction it would be to have to ride Marathon over the fences, which, as he looked from the window, loomed larger and larger in the twilight, as they approached the grazing districts. No secret, it has been said, is so close as that between a horse and his rider; and Mr. Sawyer hardly liked to confess, even to himself, the very inferior brute he had got in the bay. Somehow all the difficulties into which he had put him seemed to rise in his mind’s eye, like an accumulation of photographs, as he sat back amongst the cushions, and, withdrawing his gaze from the outward world, fixed it on the lately-lit lamp above his head. He remembered, not without a shudder, what a cropper the brute gave him at that stile in the potato-garden, which at least he might have scrambled over, if he had only risen six inches. He recalled the famous run he lost from the Forty-acres, because no persuasion would induce Marathon to face the bullfinch enclosing that meritorious fox-covert, and which a donkey could get through, if he would only look at it. He reflected how the animal perversely “Struck all his timber, fathomed all his ditches;” how he had never cleared a brook with him, or gone a run to his master’s satisfaction; and how even old Isaac allowed his favourite “wur a better nag in the stable nor he wur in the field;” and so musing, he shuddered to think of their joint endeavours to get out of a fifty-acre pasture, with an ox-fence all round it, and the gate locked! To avoid such horrible visions, he would have plunged once more into conversation, but looking at his neighbour, observed he was now deep in “The Idylls of the King,”—an epic which served at least to keep the Honourable Crasher awake, thereby substantiating a theory I have heard broached by certain philosophers, and which I am not entirely prepared to dispute, viz. that there is something of poetry in every man who rides hard across a country.