"Listen, Dan. I have a sort of regard for you, and so I'll give you this warning: If you swallow that stuff that's overloading your knife"—Dan wasn't genteel in his eating—"I'll have to ride a hurdle race upon your big toe, and I'll be bail that I'll make it beat all the rest of your anatomy in the way of jumping."
"You don't mean that?" cried Dan, dropping knife and all into the plate before him.
"Every word of it," said the little fellow.
"Oh, get out! you're not in airnest?"
"May-be you'd like to try?"
"Be the mortial o' war, I don't b'leeve you, anyway the hungriness is drivin' all consequences out of me reckonin', so, here goes, jump or no jump." So, with a desperate recklessness, Dan rushed greedily at the eatables, and never in his life did he eat the tithe part of what he demolished upon this occasion. Everything on the table disappeared before his all-devouring appetite, like smoke, and as the materials were handy, he topped all up with a "screechin' hot" tumbler of whisky-punch, stiff enough to poke courage into any man's heart.
In the meantime, wholly absorbed in his prodigious banquet, he had quite lost sight of his friend, the jockey; but now, as with a sigh of intense satisfaction, he reclined back in the cushioned chair, he became sensible of a sort of fidgetiness about his foot, and on looking down, what should he see but the little chap, very busy indeed, with his whip in his mouth, saddling up his big toe, as gingerly as you please. He was just giving the girth a last pull, which he accompanied with the usual jerking expression, making Dan wince a little, from a sense of tightness in the nag.
The business-like manner of the chap, however, soon banished the uncomfortable feeling, and so excited Dan's risibilities, that the tears rolled down his cheeks with uncontrollable laughter. It is astonishing how very near the surface the leverage of a good dinner and a warm "tod," lifts up one's jolly feelings.
Dan was now in a condition to sign a treaty of perpetual amity with all mankind.
Delusive tranquillity!