Harpagus, Black Auster, Sleipnir and Ilderim, Bayardo and Brigliadoro, the Cid's Babieca, Dick Turpin's Black Bess; not to mention the two chargers, Copenhagen and Marengo, whom Waterloo was yet to make famous. As she mounted the last rise by Whiddycross Green her ribs were heaving sorely, her breath came in short quick coughs, her head lagged almost between her bony knees; but none the less she held on down the steep hill, all strewn with loose stones, to the ferry slip; and there, dropping her haunches, slid, checked herself almost at the water's edge, and stood quivering. Billy Bates, the ferryman at Little Ferry, had heard the clatter of hoofs, and tumbled out to unchain his boat; a trifling matter for him, since he habitually slept in his clothes. "Hallo!" said he, holding his lantern high and taking stock of the gunner's regimentals. "I allowed you'd be a messenger from Sir Felix. They tell me her leddyship is expectin'." "I pity her then," gasped Gunner Sobey, and waved an arm. "Man, the French be landed, an' the country's ablaze!" Billy Bates set down his lantern on the slip and ran two trembling hands through his scanty locks. "If that's so," he answered, "you don't get no boat of mine. There's Hosken's blue boat; you'll find her moored off by a shoreline. Take _she_ if you will; he's a single man." "Darn your old carcass!" swore Gunner Sobey. "I wish now I'd waited to cross over before tellin' 'ee!" "I dare say you do. Well, good night, soce. I'm off to tell the old woman." Man is a selfish animal. As Gunner Sobey hauled Hosken's blue boat to shore, poor Pleasant came down the slip-way and rubbed her muzzle against his sleeve, dumbly beseeching him to fetch the horse-boat that she too might cross. He struck her sharply across the nose, and, jumping aboard, thrust off from the shore. In telling Miss Marty that the town was deserted, Cai Tamblyn had forgotten the Vicar. That good man, it is perhaps superfluous to say, had not sought his bed. He was a widower, and had no one to dissuade him from keeping vigil until daybreak. At ten o'clock, therefore, having seen to the trimming of his lamp and dismissed the servants to rest, he lit his study fire, set the kettle upon it, and having mixed himself a bowl of brandy-punch (in the concoction of which all Troy acknowledged him to be an expert), drew his arm-chair close to the genial blaze, and sat alternately sipping his brew and conning for the thousandth time the annotated pamphlet in which he had demonstrated exhaustively, redundantly, irrefutably, beyond possibility of disbelief or doubt, that with the morrow the world's great age must be renewed and the Millennium dawn upon earth. For an hour and a half, or maybe three-quarters, he sat reading and reassuring himself that the armour of his proof was indeed proof-armour and exposed no chink to assault; and then--