"Father says he is."
"And he said he was fat."
"Dr. Barnes is old, and he's fat."
"But his head's bare."
"Nibble isn't bald, and he isn't gray either."
"He's brown."
Mrs. Dunway had told the exact truth about Hannibal, or Nibble, as the children called him. He and Barry were just of an age, and he had been a mere two-year-old colt when Prue was a baby in her cradle.
It was after that that Colonel Dunway had taken Hannibal with him to the army, and brought him home again.
He had been a war-horse, the Colonel said, and so it would not do to turn him into a plough-horse, and the consequence was that Nibble did not have enough work to do, and he grew fat too fast.
Yet he and Barry were only nine years old apiece. That made eighteen years between them; and if you added seven years for Prue, it would only have made twenty-five, and everybody knows that is not very old, if you had given them all to Hannibal.