Page:In bad company and other stories.djvu/390

 moderate length, with a delicately-marked crest. But his shoulder! Never have I seen mortal horse with such another. It was a study. So oblique was it; so graceful and elastic was the fore-action in consequence, that you wondered how horses of less perfect mechanism got on at all. His back was short, his croup high. The finely formed, silken-haired tail, which after his death hung in my room, was set on like that of an Arab. He might easily have been ridden without a girth to the saddle. Though his back appeared to be hardly the length of one, he stood over more ground than horses that looked bigger in every way. His barrel was rounded and well ribbed up. Below the knee and hock the legs were admirably clean and flat-boned, with pasterns just long enough to give the elastic motion which so peculiarly distinguishes the thoroughbred.

In those days (I was young, to be sure) I occasionally relieved my pent-up feelings by the perpetration of verse. In an old scrap-book are traced certain 'Lines to a Thoroughbred' which must have been inspired by Romeo. They commence—

Allusion was also made, if I mistake not, to a problematic ancestor, the well-ridden steed of the poets, who after

became 'a cherished playmate, loving and beloved.' Though high-tempered enough, Romeo was a good-humoured horse in the main, but the companionship of grooms and stable-boys had partly rubbed off the inherited gentillesse of the desert. Notably in one particular.

Whether he had been in some way teased or troubled, or that some mischievous groom had been at the pains to each him the specific trick, I cannot say; but the fact was notorious that if any one—in or near the stable—made a noise with the mouth, like the drawing of a cork, the old