riding on a little shaggy horse down the village where
he lived, leading the foal in a halter.

He hurried out to inquire the cause of this, too well auguring some sad
mischief, when Johnny, shaking his head, said, "Ill luck, my friend,
never comes alone; it's an old saying, that it never rains but it pours;
and so it's been with me. T' other day I'd a son drowned, as fine a lad
as ever walked in shoe-leather; and in hurrying to th' doctor, how
should luck have it, but down comes th' mare with her foot in a hole,
breaks her leg, and was obligated to be killed; and here's th' poor
innocent foal. It's a bad job, a very bad job; but I've the worst on't,
and it canna be helped; so, prithee, say as little as thou can about
it,--here's the foal, poor, dumb thing, at all events."

"But what business," cried the gentleman, enraged, and caring, in his
wrath, not a button for Johnny Darbyshire's drowned son, in the
exasperation of his own loss,--"but what business had you riding to the
doctor, or the devil, on my mare? Did not I enjoin you, did you not
solemnly promise me, that nobody should cross the mare's back?"

Johnny shook his head. He had indeed promised "to use her as his own,"
and he had done it to some purpose; but that was little likely to throw
cold water on the gentleman's fire. It was in vain that Johnny tried the
pathetic of the drowning boy; it was lost on the man who had lost his
favorite mare, and who declared that he would rather have lost a
thousand pounds,--a hundred was exactly her value,--and he vowed all
sorts of vengeance and of law.

And he kept his word too. Johnny was deaf to paying for the mare. He had
lost his boy, and his summer's run of the mare and foal, and that he
thought enough for a poor man like him, as he pleased to call himself.
An action was commenced against him, of which he took not the slightest
notice till it came into court. These lawyers, he said, were dear chaps,
he'd have nothing to do with them. But the lawyers were determined to
have to do with him, for they imagined that the Quaker had a deep purse,
and they longed to be poking their long, jewelled fingers to the bottom
of it.

The cause actually came into court at the assizes, and the counsel for
the plaintiff got up and stated the case, offering to call his evidence,
but first submitted that he could not find that any one was retained on
behalf of the defendant, and that, therefore, he probably meant to
suffer the cause t