ntrated, passionate, intense.

Ikey with all his faults was an admirable citizen, beloved in his own
country and not without cause, as Universities and Public Bodies
innumerable could testify. For twenty-five years it had been known that
he had been trying for a goal. At last he had won it--and then John
Bull!... Ya-as.... American horse--American owner--American jockey!
Sure....

Brother Jonathon turned in his lips. He did not blame John Bull; he was
not angry or resentful. But he was determined and above all ironical.

Then, when feeling was at its highest, the Mocassin Song had suddenly
taken America by storm. Sung first in the Empire Theatre on the Broadway
by Abe Gideon, the bark-blocks comedian, ten days after the mare's
victory and defeat, it had raged through the land like a prairie fire.
Cattle-men on the Mexican Border sung it in the chaparral, and the
lumber-camps by the Great Lakes echoed it at night. Gramophones carried
it up and down the Continent from Oyster Bay to Vancouver, and from
Frisco to New Orleans. Every street-boy whistled it, every organ ground
it out. It hummed in the heads of Senators in Congress, and teased
saints upon their knees. It carried the name and fame of Mocassin to
thousands of pious homes in which horses and racing had been anathema
in the past, so that Ministers from Salem and Quaker ladies from
Philadelphia could tell you over tea cups _sotto voce_ something of the
romantic story of the mare from the Cumberland.

And that was not all.

The Song, raging through the land like a bush-fire, dying down here only
to burst out in fresh vehemence elsewhere, leapt even oceans in its
tempestuous course.

The English sang it in their music-halls with fatuous self-complacency.
Indeed they, too, went Mocassin-mad, and the mare who had once already
humbled the Old Country in the dust, and would again, became the idol of
the British Empire.

In shop-windows, on boardings, stamped on the packet of cigarettes you
bought, the picture of the mare was met, until her keen mouse-head, her
drooping quarters and great fore-hand, had been impressed on the mind of
the English Public as clearly as the features of Lord Kitchener.
Jonathon watched his brother across the Atlantic with cynical amusement.

Honest John Bull, now that he had something up against him that could
beat his best, what did he do? Admit defeat? Not John! If the mare won
in the coming struggle he claimed her as his own with tea