We have related this conversation at a length which a certain class of our readers will probably find tedious, but it is necessary to a right comprehension of various features in the picture we are about to draw. At the Stag’s Head the friends stopped to let the horses blow, and, while the animals were cooling themselves under the care of Stephen Hoof, McBrain’s coachman, the gentlemen took a short walk in the hamlet. At several points, as they moved along, they overheard the subject of the murders alluded to, and saw divers newspapers, in the hands of sundry individuals, who were eagerly perusing accounts of the same events; sometimes by themselves, but oftener to groups of attentive listeners. The travellers were now so near town as to be completely within its moral, not to say physical, atmosphere—being little more than a suburb of New York. On their return to the inn, the doctor stopped under the shed to look at his horses, before Stephen checked them up again, previously to a fresh start. Stephen was neither an Irishman nor a black; but a regular, old-fashioned, Manhattannese coachman; a class apart, and of whom, in the confusion of tongues that pervades that modern Babel, a few still remain, like monuments of the past, scattered along the Appian Way. “How do your horses stand the heat, Stephen?” the doctor kindly enquired, always speaking of the beasts as if they were the property of the coachman, and not of himself. “Pill looks as if he had been well warmed this morning.” “Yes, sir, he takes it somewhat hotter than Poleus, in the spring of the year, as a gineral thing. Pill vill vork famously, if a body vill only give him his feed in vhat I calls a genteel vay; but them ’ere country taverns has nothing nice about ’em, not even a clean manger; and a town horse that is accustomed to a sweet stable and proper company, won’t stand up to the rack as he should do, in one of their holes. Now, Poleus I calls a gineral feeder; it makes no matter vith him vhether he is at home, or out on a farm—he finishes his oats, but it isn’t so vith Pill, sir—his stomach is delicate, and the horse that don’t get his proper food vill sweat, summer or vinter.” “I sometimes think, Stephen, it might be better to take them both off their oats for a few days, and let blood, perhaps; they say that the fleam is as good for a horse as the lancet is for a man.” “Do n’t think on’t, sir, I beg of you! I’m sure they has doctor-stuff in their names, not to crowd ’em down vith any more, jist as varm veather is a settin’ in. Oats is physic enough for a horse, and vhen the creaturs vants anything more, sir, jist leave ’em to me. I knows as peculiar a drench as ever vas poured down a vheeler’s throat, vithout troublin’ that academy in Barclay street, vhere so many gentlemen goes two or three times a veek, and vhere they do say, so many goes in as never comes out whole.”