for one and a quarter; he wanted one and a half.
Besides, another Party was trying to get her; and now ensued a
negotiation which for intricacy and mystery surpassed all the others. It
was conducted in my friend's interest by one who had the difficult task
of keeping the owner's imagination in check and his demands within
bounds, for it soon appeared that he wanted even more than one and a
half for her. Unseen and inaccessible, he grew every day more
unmanageable. He entered into relations with the other Party, and it all
ended in his sending her out one day after my friend had gone into the
country, and requiring him to say at once that he would give one and a
half. He was not at home, and he never saw the little mare again. This
confirmed him in the belief that she was the very horse he ought to have
had.

People had now begun to say to him, "Why don't you advertise? Advertise
for a gentleman's pony-horse and phaeton and harness complete. You'll
have a perfect procession of them before night." This proved true. His
advertisement, mystically worded after the fashion of those things,
found abundant response. But the establishments which he would have
taken he could not get at the figure he had set, and those which his
money would buy he would not have. They came at all hours of the day;
and he never returned home after an an absence without meeting the
reproach that _now_ the very horse he wanted had just been driven away,
and would not be brought back, as his owner lived in Billerica, and only
happened to be down. A few equipages really appeared desirable, but in
regard to these his jaded faculties refused to work: he could decide
nothing; his volition was extinct; he let them come and go.

It was at this period that people who had at first been surprised that
he wished to buy a horse came to believe that he had bought one, and
were astonished to learn that he had not. He felt the pressure of public
opinion.

He began to haunt the different sale-stables in town, and to look at
horses with a view to buying at private sale. Every facility for testing
them was offered him, but he could not make up his mind. In feeble
wantonness he gave appointments which he knew he should not keep, and,
passing his days in an agony of multitudinous indecision, he added to
the lies in the world the hideous sum of his broken engagements. From
time to time he forlornly appeared at the Chevaliers', and refreshed his
corrupted nature by con