"There isn't as much condition on him as'd bait a hook," said Jimmy Hosford.
"Oh, Jimmy!" we screamed as one man, "he's a lovely——"
"Ah, God help ye!" said Jimmy Hosford, washing his hands of a bargain in which he had to suffer such collaborators.
"My darlin' childhren," said Jer in a hoarse whisper to us, "don't mind for he bein' a small bit thin an' wake in himself; it's what ails him"—the whisper deepened and thickened—"he was ridden—by nights!" he paused awfully; "wouldn't I find him in the mornings bate out an' sweatin'; an' signs on it, the world wouldn't make him cross runnin' wather!"
"Who rode him?" said we, thrilling to the implied mystery.
Jer looked right and left over his shoulders.
"Those People!" said he.
A fairy-ridden pony! It needed but that touch of romance. The pony was bought. £5 and a weakling heifer calf were the terms finally agreed to. The explanation offered subsequently by Old Michael that it was the Tragumena boys that took the pony by nights for blagyarding, and to ride him in the tide, was dismissed with deserved contempt; the pony was called Fairy, and a better never bolted in a snaffle, or kicked its rider over its head when invited to jump a stream.
Those who have in any measure dipped below the surface of stable yard politics, can hardly fail to have become aware, even in a minor degree, of the subtle relations existing between the house dogs and the yard cats. That an understanding, almost amounting to a treaty, obtains, there can be no reasonable doubt. That the dogs are ashamed of it is certain; that the cats are not, is a fact bound up in the character of cats, who are never ashamed of anything. But yesterday, unsuspected and unseen, I viewed a typical instance of the strange and chilly truce that holds in the ashpit when the house dogs, the yard cats, the turkey cock, and, most implacably hated of all by all, the pensionnaire hound mother and her brood, feasted horribly and illicitly among cinders and refuse. The house dogs, furtively and hurriedly, with ears laid back, and guilty pauses in mid-bone; the hound mother grossly and jealously, something disposed to truculence; the turkey cock contemptibly, with sunken tail, and wattles of faded pink, prepared to skip four times his own length if the hound mother so much as looked at him.
Of the whole party the hound puppies and the cats alone showed to any advantage. The puppies, jovially unaware of the momentousness of each instant, sprawled and croaked over the woolly shin bone of a lamb; the cats were unalterably dignified, nibbling with deliberate daintiness the remains of a long-interred cod-fish. A millennial peace rested upon the scene.