The season has advanced rapidly during my progress from Dublin to the Avenue; and by the time I reach the famous old tavern, not far from the station, it is a Sunday morning of early summer, and the yellow sunlight falls upon a body of good comrades who are grooming a marvelous number of piebald steeds about the stable-doors. By token of these beasts--which always look so much more like works of art than of nature--I know that there is to be a circus somewhere very soon; and the gay bills pasted all over the stable-front tell me that there are to be two performances at the Port on the morrow. The grooms talk nothing and joke nothing but horse at their labor; and their life seems such a low, ignorant, happy life, that the secret nomad lurking in every respectable and stationary personality stirs within me and struggles to strike hands of fellowship with them. They lead a sort of pastoral existence in our age of railroads; they wander over the continent with their great caravan, and everywhere pursue the summer from South to North and from North to South again; in the mild forenoons they groom their herds, and in the afternoons they doze under their wagons, indifferent to the tumult of the crowd within and without the mighty canvas near them,--doze face downwards on the bruised, sweet-smelling grass; and in the starry midnight rise and strike their tents, and set forth again over the still country roads, to take the next village on the morrow with the blaze and splendor of their “Grand Entree.” The triumphal chariot in which the musicians are borne at the head of the procession is composed, as I perceive by the bills, of four colossal gilt swans, set tail to tail, with lifted wings and curving necks; but the chariot, as I behold it beside the stable, is mysteriously draped in white canvas, through which its gilding glitters only here and there. And does it move thus shrouded in the company's wanderings from place to place, and is the precious spottiness of the piebalds then hidden under envious drapery? O happy grooms,--not clean as to shirts, nor especially neat in your conversation, but displaying a Wealth of art in India-ink upon your manly chests and the swelling muscles of your arms, and speaking in every movement your freedom from all conventional gyves and shackles, _“seid umschlungen!”_--in spirit; for the rest, you are rather too damp, and seem to have applied your sudsy sponges too impartially to your own trousers and the horses' legs to receive an actual embrace from a _dilettante_ vagabond.