“Well, then, I live a piece up beyond Old Cambridge—you can see our steeple off on a hill to the right, when we get a little further. Well, one day, I had a customer (he was carried off by typhus) which had to be toted into town—cause why? he had a vault there. So I rubbed down the old mare, and put her in the fills. Ah! Sir! that critter knows as much as an Injun, and more than a Nigger. She’s as sober as a judge when she gets the shop—that’s what I call the hearse—behind her. You would not think she was a three-minute nag, to look at her. Well, Sir, as luck would have it, by a sort of providential inspiration, the day before, I’d took off the old wooden springs and set the body on elliptics. For I thought it a hard case that a gentleman who’d been riding easy all his life, should go to his grave on wooden springs. Ah! I deal well by my customers. I thought of patent boxes to the wheels, but _I_ couldn’t afford it, and the parish are desperate stingy. “Well, I got him in, and led off the string—fourteen hacks, and a dearbourn wagon at the tail of the funeral. We made a fine show. As luck would have it, just as we came abreast of Porter’s, out slides that eternal torment, Bill Sikes, in his new trotting sulky, with the brown horse that he bought for a fast crab, and _is_ mighty good for a rush, but hain’t got nigh so much bottom as the mare. Bill’s light weight, and his sulky’s a mere feather. Well, Sir, Bill came up alongside, and walked his horse a bit. He looked at the mare and then at me, and then he winked. Then he looked at his nag and put his tongue in his cheek, and winked. I looked straight ahead, and only said to myself, ‘Cuss you, Bill Sikes.’ By and bye, he let his horse slide. He travelled about a hundred yards, and then held up till I came abreast, and then he winked and bantered me again. It was aggravatin’, that’s a fact. Says I to myself, says I: ‘That’s twice you’ve done it, my buzzum friend and sweet-scented shrub—but you doesn’t do that ’ere again.’ The third time he bantered me I let him have it. It was only saying, ‘Scat you brute,’ and she was off—that mare. He had all the odds, you know, for I was toting a two hundred pounder, and he ought to have beat me like breaking sticks, now hadn’t he? He had me at the first brush, for I told you the brown horse was a mighty fast one for a little ways. But soon I lapped him. I had no whip, and he could use his string—but he had his hands full. “Side by side, away we went—rattle-te-bang! crack! abuz! thump!—and I afraid of losing my customer on the road; but I was more afraid of losing the race. The reputation of the old mare was at stake, and I swore she should have a fair chance. We went so fast that the posts and rails by the road-side looked like a log fence. The old church and the new one, and the colleges, spun past like Merry-Andrews.