arp and
protuberant; his tail was what is known among horsemen as a rat-tail,
being but scantily covered with hair, and his neck was even more
scantily supplied with a mane, while in color he could easily have taken
any premium put up for homeliness, being an ashen roan, mottled with
flecks and patches of divers hues; but his legs were flat and corded
like a racer's, his neck long and thin as a thoroughbred's, his nostrils
large, his ears sharply pointed and lively, while the white rings around
his eyes hinted at a cross, somewhere in his pedigree, with Arabian
blood. A huge, bony, homely-looking horse he was, who drew the deacon
and Miranda into the village on market days and Sundays, with a loose,
shambling gait, making altogether an appearance so homely and peculiar
that the smart village chaps riding along in their jaunty turn-outs used
to chaff the good deacon on the character of his steed, and satirically
challenge him to a brush. The deacon always took their badinage in good
part, although he inwardly said more than once, "If I ever get a good
chance, when there ar'n't too many around, I'll go up to the turn of the
road beyond the church, and let Jack out on them;" for Dick had given
him a hint of the horse's history, and told him "he could knock the
spots out of thirty," and wickedly urged the deacon to take the starch
out of them airy chaps some of these days. Such was the horse, then,
that the deacon had ahead of him, and the old-fashioned sleigh, when,
with the parson alongside, he struck into the principal street of the
village.

Now, New Year's Day is a lively day in many country villages, and on
this bright one especially, as the sleighing was perfect, everybody was
out. Indeed, it had got noised abroad that certain trotters of local
fame were to be on the street that afternoon, and, as the boys worded
it, "there would be heaps of fun going on." And so it happened that
everybody in town, and many who lived out of it, were on this particular
street, and just at the hour, too, when the deacon came to the foot of
it, so that the walk on either side was lined darkly with lookers-on,
and the smooth snow-path between the two lines looked like a veritable
homestretch on a race-day.

Now, when the deacon had reached the corner of the main street and
turned into it, it was at that point where the course terminated and the
"brushes" were ended, and at the precise moment when the dozen or twenty
horses that had jus