nt, when the colonel appeared about a half-mile away, and
bore down upon the crowd. Everyone was eager to inspect his mount; and
such a mount as it proved to be was never before seen, even in Left
Bower!

You have seen "perfect skeletons" of horses often enough, no doubt, but
this animal was not even a perfect skeleton; there were bones missing
here and there which you would not have believed the beast could have
spared. "Little" the colonel had called her! She was not an inch less
than eighteen hands high, and long out of all reasonable proportion. She
was so hollow in the back that she seemed to have been bent in a
machine. She had neither tail nor mane, and her neck, as long as a man,
stuck straight up into the air, supporting a head without ears. Her eyes
had an expression in them of downright insanity, and the muscles of her
face were afflicted with periodical convulsions that drew back the
corners of the mouth and wrinkled the upper lip so as to produce a
ghastly grin every two or three seconds. In color she was "claybank,"
with great blotches of white, as if she had been pelted with small bags
of flour. The crookedness of her legs was beyond all comparison, and as
to her gait it was that of a blind camel walking diagonally across
innumerable deep ditches. Altogether she looked like the crude result of
Nature's first experiment in equifaction.

As this libel on all horses shambled up to the starting post there was a
general shout; the sympathies of the crowd changed in the twinkling of
an eye! Everyone wanted to bet on her, and the Englishman himself was
only restrained from doing so by a sense of honor. It was growing late,
however, and the judge insisted on starting them. They got off very well
together, and seeing the mare was unconscionably slow the Englishman
soon pulled his animal in and permitted the ugly thing to pass him, so
as to enjoy a back view of her. That sealed his fate. The course had
been marked off in a circle of two miles in circumference and some
twenty feet wide, the limits plainly defined by little furrows. Before
the animals had gone a half mile both had been permitted to settle down
into a comfortable walk, in which they continued three-fourths of the
way round the ring. Then the Englishman thought it time to whip up and
canter in.

But he didn't. As he came up alongside the "Lightning Express," as the
crowd had begun to call her, that creature turned her head diagonally
backward and le