tact with their sterling integrity. Once he
ventured into their establishment just before an auction began, and
remained dazzled by the splendor of a spectacle which I fancy can be
paralleled only by some dream of a mediaeval tournament. The horses,
brilliantly harnessed, accurately shod, and standing tall on burnished
hooves, their necks curved by the check rein and their black and blonde
manes flowing over the proud arch, lustrous and wrinkled like satin,
were ranged in a glittering hemicycle. They affected my friend like the
youth and beauty of his earliest evening parties; he experienced a sense
of bashfulness, of sickening personal demerit. He could not have had the
audacity to bid on one of those superb creatures, if all the Chevaliers
together had whispered him that here at last was the very horse.

I pass over an unprofitable interval in which he abandoned himself to
despair, and really gave up the hope of being able ever to buy a horse.
During this interval he removed from Charlesbridge to the country, and
found himself, to his self-scorn and self-pity, actually reduced to
hiring a livery horse by the day. But relief was at hand. The carpenter
who had remained to finish up the new house after my friend had gone
into it bethought himself of a firm in his place who brought on horses
from the West, and had the practice of selling a horse on trial, and
constantly replacing it with other horses till the purchaser was suited.
This seemed an ideal arrangement, and the carpenter said that he
_thought_ they had the very horse my friend wanted.

The next day he drove him up, and upon the plan of successive exchanges
till the perfect horse was reached, my friend bought him for one and a
quarter, the figure which he had kept in mind from the first. He bought
a phaeton and harness from the same people, and when the whole equipage
stood at his door, he felt the long-delayed thrill of pride and
satisfaction. The horse was of the Morgan breed, a bright bay, small and
round and neat, with a little head tossed high, and a gentle yet alert
movement. He was in the prime of youth, of the age of which every horse
desires to be, and was just coming seven. My friend had already taken
him to a horse-doctor, who for one dollar had gone all over him, and
pronounced him sound as a fish, and complimented his new owner upon his
acquisition. It all seemed too good to be true. As Billy turned his soft
eye on the admiring family group, and suf