Larry had champagne-bottle shoulders, rather bowed legs, and a back like the hind view of a lobster. He was a decent-living man, a superb horseman, an excellent groom, and a heaven-born vet. He was nothing else. If his character had been cut out of cardboard the line of demarcation between living efficiency and dead blankness could not have been more sharply defined. Larry was not only entirely and utterly destitute of all—even the most rudimentary—knowledge of Politics, Astronomy, Art, Literature (including writing and spelling) and Geography, but he was destitute also of the power of acquiring such knowledge, or the wish to do so. He was a living example of what horses can do for a man if he devotes himself to them properly, and to nothing else. Tell him to do a stable job, and everything would be done well and up to time, but send him on the simplest business into the outside world beyond the smell of ammonia, and everything would be muddled. He would have made a splendid ambassador to the Huhyhnms, but for anything else in the universe beyond his work he was worthless. This was Larry, sober. “Once in a while,” Larry got drunk. That is a plain statement of the fact. The whisky flew to his head, and one may amuse oneself with imagining the consternation of the whisky fiend on finding itself in such a skull. The man could not be made speechless, because he was always speechless; nor talkative, because he had nothing to talk about. He could not be made to blunder worse in the ordinary affairs of life. On these occasions Larry made mistakes in his work, but it is only fair to him to say they were very rare occasions. He was standing in the harness room cleaning a bit with sand by the light of a lantern, when Patsy appeared to summon him to help in fixing up the burglar trap. “Larry,” said Patsy, sticking his head in through the half-open door. “Oh, there you are. Mr Fanshawe wants you in the house.” “I’m finishin’ clanin’ me harness,” replied Larry. (Mr Lyburn always spoke of the harness as his personal property, also of the horses.) “How much more of it have you to clane?” “Nothin’.” “Well, finish it up in a hurry,” said Patsy, “for he’s waitin’ till you come.” “Get off that chist!” cried Larry, polishing away at the bit, as Patsy made to take his seat on a big corn-bin whose lid did duty for a table. “Get off that chist, or I’ll land you a wan wid me fut.” Patsy got off the chest. Mr Lyburn was very touchy about a lot of things, and he expressed himself directly; it was part of the cardboard nature of the individual: he had no _nuances_ of expression.