and are apt, like the latter, to be
vicious.

He began to have a quick eye for the characteristics of horses, and
could walk round a proffered animal and scan his points with the best.
"What," he would ask, of a given beast, "makes him let his lower lip
hang down in that imbecile manner?"

"Oh, he's got a parrot-mouth. Some folks like 'em." Here the dealer
would pull open the creature's flabby lips, and discover a beak like
that of a polyp; and the cleansing process on the grass or trousers
would take place.

Of another. "What makes him trot in that spread-out, squatty way,
behind?" he demanded, after the usual tour of the block.

"He travels wide. Horse men prefer that."

They preferred any ugliness or awkwardness in a horse to the opposite
grace or charm, and all that my friend could urge, in meek withdrawal
from negotiation, was that he was not of an educated taste. In the
course of long talks, which frequently took the form of warnings, he
became wise in the tricks practiced by all dealers except his
interlocutor. One of these, a device for restoring youth to an animal
nearing the dangerous limit of eleven, struck him as peculiarly
ingenious. You pierce the forehead, and blow into it with a quill; this
gives an agreeable fullness, and erects the drooping ears in a spirited
and mettlesome manner, so that a horse coming eleven will look for a
time as if he were coming five.

After a thorough course of the volunteer dealers, and after haunting the
Chevaliers' stables for several weeks, my friend found that not money
alone was needed to buy a horse. The affair began to wear a sinister
aspect. He had an uneasy fear that in several cases he had refused the
very horse he wanted with the _aplomb_ he had acquired in dismissing
undesirable beasts. The fact was he knew less about horses than when he
began to buy, while he had indefinitely enlarged his idle knowledge of
men, of their fatuity and hollowness. He learned that men whom he had
always envied their brilliant omniscience in regard to horses, as they
drove him out behind their dashing trotters, were quite ignorant and
helpless in the art of buying; they always got somebody else to buy
their horses for them. "Find a man you can trust," they said, "and then
put yourself in his hands. And _never_ trust anybody about the health of
a horse. Take him to a veterinary surgeon, and have him go all over
him."

My friend grew sardonic; then he grew melancholy and haggard