le creatures! It
was difficult to believe that they had souls. No wonder they were
cheap, and 'went off,' as the shopman said, so quickly, whilst he
stayed grandly on, cynosure of eyes that dared not hope for him. Into
bondage they went off, those others, and would be worked to death,
doubtless, by brutal little boys.

When, one fine day, a lady was actually not shocked by the price
demanded for him, his pride was hurt. And when, that evening, he was
packed in brown paper and hoisted to the roof of a four-wheeler, he
faced the future fiercely. Who was this lady that her child should dare
bestride him? With a biblical 'ha, ha,' he vowed that the child should
not stay long in saddle: he must be thrown--badly--even though it was
his seventh birthday. But this wicked intention vanished while the
child danced around him in joy and wonder. Never yet had so many
compliments been showered on him. Here, surely, was more the manner of
a slave than of a master. And how lightly the child rode him, with
never a tug or a kick! And oh, how splendid it was to be flying thus
through the air! Horses were made to be ridden; and he had never before
savoured the true joy of life, for he had never known his own strength
and fleetness. Forward! Backward! Faster, faster! To floor! To ceiling!
Regiments of leaden soldiers watched his wild career. Noah's quiet
sedentary beasts gaped up at him in wonderment--as tiny to him as the
gaping cows in the fields are to you when you pass by in an express
train. This was life indeed! He remembered Katafalto--remembered
Eclipse and the rest nowhere. Aye, thought he, and even thus must Black
Bess have rejoiced along the road to York. And Bucephalus, skimming
under Alexander the plains of Asia, must have had just this glorious
sense of freedom. Only less so! Not Pegasus himself can have flown more
swiftly. Pegasus, at last, became a constellation in the sky. 'Some
day,' reflected the rocking-horse, when the ride was over, 'I, too,
shall die; and five stars will appear on the nursery ceiling.'

Alas for the vanity of equine ambition! I wonder by what stages this
poor beast came down in the world. Did the little boy's father go
bankrupt, leaving it to be sold in a 'lot' with the other toys? Or was
it merely given away, when the little boy grew up, to a poor but
procreative relation, who anon became poorer? I should like to think
that it had been mourned. But I fear that whatever mourning there may
have been