Oh what a picture! and that I should be obliged to exhibit to your view the counterfeit presentment. The ploughboys are just coming out of the stable with their master's horses going to plough. Here, sir, is Buck-e-fallus, as the negro boys call Bucephalus. There is no difficulty in mounting _him_; they have knocked out one of his eyes; he has a blind side and cannot see the shadow cast by the sun. If his spirit was ever as high as his namesake's, he has lost it now--that little ragged urchin can ride him with a grape-vine--raw-boned, spavined and wind-galled! let him pass and let us see the next. This is Smiler! "Lucus a non lucendo," I suppose; alas! _he_ never smiles--he reminds one of Irving's wall eyed horse looking out of the stable window on a rainy day. His look is disconsolate in the extreme; from the imperturbable gravity of his manners, you perceive he is dead to hope; melancholy has marked him for her own; bad feeding, constant toil, and a lost currycomb, have made him "what thou well may'st hate," although he once "set down" as "shapely a shank" as Burns' Auld mare Maggie ever did. Do you see that long legged fellow, that Brobdignag, mounted upon the little mare mule? His legs almost drag the ground, and he ought in justice to _toat_ (aye, sir, _toat_, a good word, an excellent word, and one upon which I mean to send you an etymological essay some of these days,) the animal he bestrides. There are some singular traits about that mule _Golliver_, as the boys by a singular misnomer call her. She keeps fat "while other nags are poor;" it is because she lives in the corn-field. She can open the stable-door by some inscrutable means, some sort of open sessame; gates are no impediments to her, and even ten rails and a rider cannot arrest her progress. She seems to have a vow upon her never to leave the plantation; she will go as far as the outer gate with her rider, but if he attempt to pass that boundary his fate is sealed. He is canted most unceremoniously over her head and made to bite the dust; that gate is her _ultima Thule_; her ne plus ultra; the utmost bound of her ambition. She has acquaintances enough, as Old Oliver says, and wishes not to extend the circle. Her policy is Chinese, or perhaps like Rasselas, she once escaped from her happy valley and was disappointed in the world--"_one fatal remembrance_" perhaps casts its "bleak shade" beyond that gate.--I know not in sooth, but heaven help me! what am I doing? If I go on thus, with the whole _stud_ of my neighbor, and write at large upon every thing which torments him, I shall never have done. Suffice it then, that I give you a hasty, panoramic sketch of what he has to encounter in his rides over his farm. See him mounted on his little switch tailed grey, which has the high sounding title of White Surrey, and whose tail is nearly cut off at the root by the crupper--the mane in most admired disorder, and fetlocks long and bushy.