Or they would wander round to the stables to call upon their friend Sim Crittenden--the prize-fighting ostler with the gentle eyes and the temper that nought might ruffle and a singing voice like a baritone god--who, leaning on the long wooden handle of his pitchfork, his shirt-sleeves rolled up, and his braces hanging looped against his breeches’ flanks, would stand at the end of the stables and sing to them songs from Handel and the masters--_Ruddier than the Cherry_ and _Toreador_ and _Nazareth_, even descending, with apologies, occasionally to _It’s a Great Big Shame_ or other latest music-hall lilt. Netherby, who began to fear a too poetic pastoral atmosphere at the inn, was to have satisfaction in the life of action that he adored, and a lively descent to vigorous prose. The hard-hitting ostler was to strike the dramatic note. Adventure came with the rougher element that rattled down in hired carriages to the inn, chi-hiking and using squalid language along the highroad on their week-end outing from London city. Cockney youth, with fantastic picturesque tendencies as to dress, and crude love in the wagonettes, descended to the ground, alighting before the inn, and swarmed into the drinking-bar, thirsty with the swallowing of dust and much shouting, buxom beauty hanging upon their arms with proud gaze boldly cast upon their noisy lords from under the heavy hair that shaded their frankly vulgar eyes, and with ear-racking laughings from their full red lips to greet all their swaggering gentlemen’s uttermost ribaldries. Inflamed by beauty, cockney youth was on the strut, well-inclined to debauch; and much beer did the rest. They made the inn a riot of vulgarity. Yet, all had gone well till twilight, and had as likely enough gone well to the hour of their home-going--and they were already foregathering in the tap-room for the drinking of the last glass--had it not been for the garrulous and boastful habit of the gardener of the inn, a red-bearded fellow of weak knees and splay feet, who got to bragging about the inn’s ostler. However, a cockney youth, a clean-limbed, quick-eyed cub, being grown something tongue-loosed by reason of the beer, at once brought out his conceit and paraded it--it also had to do with some little parochial honour in which he was held with regard to the skilful use of his naked hands--he had made some tough fellow’s nose bleed or arrived at the like godlike achievement. He thought himself a match, he said, for any fellow that messed about horses. This with prodigious blasphemies. Whereat the red-bearded gardener laughed loudly; and the cockney youth, fired with wrath, hit at the centre of the laugh, and missing the gardener’s mouth, the which was no such difficult job for the tangled thicket of red hair about the laugh, got his clumsy knuckles somewhere in the region of the gardener’s nose and set the blood flowing.