he shadowy sombrero, and armed with the huge spurs,
sat in his high-peaked saddle, could belong only to the mustang of the
Pampas and his master. This bold rider was a young man whose sudden
apparition in the quiet inland town had reminded some of the good people
of a bright, curly-haired boy they had known some eight or ten years
before as little Dick Venner.

This boy had passed several of his early years at the Dudley mansion,
the playmate of Elsie, being her cousin, two or three years older than
herself, the son of Captain Richard Venner, a South American trader,
who, as he changed his residence often, was glad to leave the boy in his
brother's charge. The Captain's wife, this boy's mother, was a lady of
Buenos Ayres, of Spanish descent, and had died while the child was in
his cradle. These two motherless children were as strange a pair as one
roof could well cover. Both handsome, wild, impetuous, unmanageable,
they played and fought together like two young leopards, beautiful, but
dangerous, their lawless instincts showing through all their graceful
movements.

The boy was little else than a young Gaucho when he first came to
Rockland; for he had learned to ride almost as soon as to walk, and
could jump on his pony and trip up a runaway pig with the bolas or noose
him with his miniature lasso at an age when some city-children would
hardly be trusted out of sight of a nursery-maid. It makes men imperious
to sit a horse; no man governs his fellows so well as from this living
throne. And so, from Marcus Aurelius in Roman bronze, down to the "man
on horseback" in General Cushing's prophetic speech, the saddle has
always been the true seat of empire. The absolute tyranny of the human
will over a noble and powerful beast develops the instinct of personal
prevalence and dominion; so that horse-subduer and hero were almost
synonymous in simpler times, and are closely related still. An ancestry
of wild riders naturally enough bequeaths also those other tendencies
which we see in the Tartars, the Cossacks, and our own Indian Centaurs,
and as well, perhaps, in the old-fashioned fox-hunting squire as in
any of these. Sharp alternations of violent action and self-indulgent
repose; a hard run, and a long revel after it; this is what over-much
horse tends to animalize a man into. Such antecedents may have helped
to make little Dick Venner a self-willed, capricious boy, and a rough
playmate for Elsie.

Elsie was the wilder of t