“Mine’s done,” said the Deacon; he licked up the remnant of his salt, dropped his nose in his master’s hand, and sang a little grace all to himself. The Deacon has the most enchanting manners of any one I know. “An’ fawnin’ on them for what is your inalienable right. It’s humiliatin’,” said the yellow horse, sniffing to see if he could find a few spare grains. “Go daown hill, then, Boney,” the Deacon replied. “Guess you’ll find somethin’ to eat still, if yer hain’t hogged it all. You’ve ett more’n any three of us to-day—an’ day ’fore that—an’ the last two months—sence you’ve been here.” “I am not addressin’ myself to the young an’ immature. I am speakin’ to those whose opinion _an_’ experience commands respect.” I saw Rod raise his head as though he were about to make a remark; then he dropped it again, and stood three-cornered, like a plough-horse. Rod can cover his mile in a shade under three minutes on an ordinary road to an ordinary buggy. He is tremendously powerful behind, but, like most Hambletonians, he grows a trifle sullen as he gets older. No one can love Rod very much; but no one can help respecting him. “I wish to wake _those_,” the yellow horse went on, “to an abidin’ sense o’ their wrongs an’ their injuries an’ their outrages.” “Haow’s that?” said Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, dreamily. He thought Boney was talking of some kind of feed. “An’ when I say outrages and injuries”—Boney waved his tail furiously—“I mean ’em, too. Great Oats! That’s just what I _do_ mean, plain an’ straight.” “The gentleman talks quite earnest,” said Tuck, the mare, to Nip, her brother. “There’s no doubt thinkin’ broadens the horizons o’ the mind. His language is quite lofty.” “Hesh, sis,” Nip answered. “He hain’t widened nothin’ ’cep’ the circle he’s ett in pasture. They feed words fer beddin’ where he comes from.” “It’s elegant talkin’, though,” Tuck returned, with an unconvinced toss of her pretty, lean little head. The yellow horse heard her, and struck an attitude which he meant to be extremely impressive. It made him look as though he had been badly stuffed. “Now I ask you, I ask you without prejudice an’ without favour,—what has Man the Oppressor ever done for you?—Are you not inalienably entitled to the free air o’ heaven, blowin’ acrost this boundless prairie?” “Hev ye ever wintered here?” said the Deacon, merrily, while the others snickered. “It’s kinder cool.” “Not yet,” said Boney. “I come from the boundless confines o’ Kansas, where the noblest of our kind have their abidin’ place among the sunflowers on the threshold o’ the settin’ sun in his glory.” “An’ they sent you ahead as a sample?” said Rick, with an amused quiver of his long, beautifully groomed tail, as thick and as fine and as wavy as a quadroon’s back hair. “Kansas, sir, needs no adver_tise_ment. Her native sons rely on themselves an’ their native sires. Yes, sir.”