nt could be as great, "within a thousand miles," as the races
he used to attend "befo' de wah, when hosses ran all de way from
Philidelphy to New Orleans." Evil-minded stable-men and boys who had
no minds--only evil--laid snares and trapfalls for "Colonel Theodoric
Johnston's Robin, of Bull-field, suh," as he loved to style himself, to
trip him and inveigle him into admissions that something was as good now
as before the war; but they had never succeeded. The gang had followed
him to the gate, where he had been going off and on all the afternoon,
and were at their mischief now while he was looking somewhat anxiously
out up the parched and yellow dusty road.

"Well, I guess freedom 's better 'n befo' d' wah?" hazarded one of his
tormentors, a hatchet-faced, yellow stable-boy with a loud, sharp voice.
He burst into a strident guffaw.

"Maybe, you does," growled Robin. He edged off, rubbing his ear. "Befo'
de wah you 'd be mindin' hawgs--what you ought to be doin' now, stidder
losin' races an' spilin' somebody's hosses, mekin' out you kin ride." A
shout of approving derision greeted this retort.

Old Robin was a man of note on that circuit. It was the canon of that
crowd to boast one's self better than everyone else in everything, but
Robin was allowed to be second only to the speaker and the superior
of everyone else with a unanimity which had its precedent only after
Salamis.

Robin had been head of Colonel Theodoric Johnston's stable before the
war, the time on which his mind dwelt with tender memory; and this,
with the consideration with which he was treated by stable-owners
and racing-gentlemen who shone like luminaries on the far edge of the
stable-boys' horizon, and the old man's undoubted knowledge of a horse,
made him an authority in that world.

The Bullfield stable had produced some of the greatest horses of the
country--horses to which the most ignorant stable-biped knew the great
winners of the present traced back their descent or were close akin--and
if Colonel Johnston's stable lost anything of prestige, it was not in
Robin's telling of it. He was at it now as he stood at the big white
gate, gazing up the road, over which hung a haze of dust. Deucalion, Old
Nina, Planet, Fanny Washington, and the whole gleaming array of fliers
went by in Robin's illumined speech, mixed up with Revenue, Boston,
Timoleon, Sir Archy and a dozen others in a blaze of equine splendor.

"Aw, what 're you giffin us!" jeered a