boys could not stay
on, though they practised a good deal, turn about, when the other
fellows were riding their horses, standing up, on the Commons. He was
not of much use in Indian fights, for he could seldom be lashed into a
gallop, and a pony that proposed to walk through an Indian fight was
ridiculous. Still, with the help of imagination, my boy employed him in
some scenes of wild Arab life, and hurled the Moorish javelin from him
in mid-career, when the pony was flying along at the mad pace of a
canal-boat. The pony early gave the boys to understand that they could
get very little out of him in the way of herding the family cow. He
would let them ride him to the pasture, and he would keep up with the
cow on the way home, when she walked, but if they wanted anything more
than that they must get some other pony. They tried to use him in
carrying papers, but the subscribers objected to having him ridden up to
their front doors over the sidewalk, and they had to give it up.

When he became an old story, and there was no competition for him among
the brothers, my boy sometimes took him into the woods, and rode him in
the wandering bridle-paths, with a thrilling sense of adventure. He did
not like to be alone there, and he oftener had the company of a boy who
was learning the trade in his father's printing-office. This boy was
just between him and his elder brother in age, and he was the good
comrade of both; all the family loved him, and made him one of them, and
my boy was fond of him because they had some tastes in common that were
not very common among the other boys. They liked the same books, and
they both began to write historical romances. My boy's romance was
founded on facts of the Conquest of Granada, which he had read of again
and again in Washington Irving, with a passionate pity for the Moors,
and yet with pride in the grave and noble Spaniards. He would have given
almost anything to be a Spaniard, and he lived in a dream of some day
sallying out upon the Vega before Granada, in silk and steel, with an
Arabian charger under him that champed its bit. In the mean time he did
what he could with the family pony, and he had long rides in the woods
with the other boy, who used to get his father's horse when he was not
using it on Sunday, and race with him through the dangling wild
grape-vines and pawpaw thickets, and over the reedy levels of the river,
their hearts both bounding with the same high hopes of a worl