sooner. Now, if by any chance you'd care
for a highball--"

"Lead me right to it!" sighed Bonnie ecstatically.

"Me, too!" echoed Wilfred, to the great astonishment of those assembled.

Beyond a Reasonable Doubt

"For twelve honest men have decided the cause,
Who are judges alike of the fact and the laws."
--The Honest Jury.

"Lastly," says Stevenson in his Letter to a Young Gentleman Who Proposes
to Embrace the Career of Art, "we come to those vocations which are at
once decisive and precise; to the men who are born with the love of
pigments, the passion of drawing, the gift of music, or the impulse to
create with words, just as other and perhaps the same men are born with
the love of hunting, or the sea, or horses, or the turning lathe. These
are predestined; if a man love the labor of any trade, apart from any
question of success or fame, the gods have called him."

Had anybody told Danny Lowry that the gods had called him he would have
stigmatized his informant as a liar--yet they had. For apart from any
question of success or fame he had loved horses from the day when as a
baby he had first sprawled in the straw of his Uncle Mike Aherne's
livery and hitching stable in Dublin City. He had grown up to the scrape
and whiffle of the currycomb, breathing ammonia, cracking the skin of
his infantile knuckles with harness soap. Out of the love that he bore
for the beautiful dumb brutes grew an understanding that in time became
almost uncanny. All the jockeys and hostlers said there was magic in
the lad's hands. He could ride anything on hoofs with a slack rein; and
the worst biter in the stable would take a bridle from him as it were an
apple.

"Oft, now, I hear him talkin' to 'em, so I do." Mike Aherne was wont to
say between spits. "An' they know what he says, I'm tellin' ye. He's a
charmer, he is; like the Whisperin' Blacksmith. You've heard tell of
him, belike? Well, Danny can spake to 'em widout even a whisper, so he
can that!"

That was near seventy years agone, and now Danny was a shrunken little
white-haired old wastrel who haunted Mulqueen's Livery over on
Twenty-fourth Street near Tenth Avenue, disappearing in and out of the
cellar and loft and stalls like a leprechaun haunts a hollow tree.
Nobody knew where he had come from or where he lived except that he
could always be found wherever there was a suffering animal, be it dog,
cat or squirrel, and the rest of the time at Mulqueen's,