Now I should like to hear how they are canvassing me in the bar, and what they think of me in the stable. I am, doubtless, a peer, or a peer's eldest son. I am a great writer, the wondrous poet of the day; or the pre-Raphaelite artist; or I am a youth heart-broken by infidelity in love; or, mayhap, a dreadful criminal. I liked this last the best, the interest was so intense; not to say that there is, to men who are not constitutionally courageous, a strong pleasure in being able to excite terror in others.
But I hear a horse's feet on the silent street. I look out Day is just breaking. Tim is holding Blondel at the door. My hour of adventure has struck, and noiselessly descending the stairs, I issue forth.
“He is a trifle tender on the fore-feet, your honor,” said Tim, as I mounted; “but when you get him off the stones on a nice piece of soft road, he 'll go like a four-year-old.”
“But he is young, Tim, isn't he?” I asked, as I tendered him my half-crown.
“Well, not to tell your honor a lie, he is not,” said Tim, with the energy of a man whose veracity had cost him little less than a spasm.
“How old would you call him, then?” I asked, in that affected ease that seemed to say, “Not that it matters to me if he were Methuselah.”
“I could n't come to his age exactly, your honor,” he replied, “but I remember seeing him fifteen years ago, dancing a hornpipe, more by token for his own benefit; it was at Cooke's Circus, in Abbey Street, and there wasn't a hair's difference between him now and then, except, perhaps, that he had a star on the forehead, where you just see the mark a little darker now.”
“But that is a star, plain enough,” said I, half vexed.
“Well, it is, and it is not,” muttered Tim, doggedly, for he was not quite satisfied with my right to disagree with him.
“He's gentle, at all events?” I said, more confidently.