those remote days. He wore the same clothes now as then; or if
not the identical clothes, as many averred, clothes of the identical
cut. Younger trainers, who were fond of having their joke with the old
man, would often inquire of him,

"Who's your tailor, Mat?"

To which the invariable answer in the familiar wheeze was,

"He died reign o' William the Fo'th, my son. Don't you wish he'd lived
to show _your_ Snips how to cut a coat?"

Mat indeed was distinctly early Victorian in his dress. He always wore a
stock instead of a tie, and the felt hat with a flat top and
broad-curled brim, which a rising young Radical statesman, for whom Mat
had once trained, had imitated. He walked with a curious and
characteristic lilt, as of a boy, rising on his toes as though reaching
after heaven. And his eye underlined, as it were, the mischievous gaiety
of his walk. It was a baffling eye: bright, blue, merry as a robin's and
very shrewd; "the eye of a cherubim," Mat once described it himself.
When it turned on you, grave yet twinkling, you knew that it summed you
up, saw through you, was aware of your wickedness, condoned it, pitied
you, comforted you, and bade you rejoice in the world and its crooked
ways. It was an innocent eye, a dewy eye, and yet a mighty knowing one.
Whether the owner of the eye was a saint or a sinner you could not
affirm. Therefore it bade you beware what you said, what you did, and
not least, what you thought, while its mild yet radiant beams were
turned upon you. One thing was quite certain: that blue eye had seen a
great deal. More, it had enjoyed the seeing. And its owner had a way of
wiping it as he ended some tale of rascality, successful or exposed,
with his habitual cliche--"I wep a tear. I did reelly," which made you
realize that the only tears it had in fact ever wept were in truth tears
of suppressed laughter over the foolishness of mortals. It had never
mourned over a lost sinner, though it had often winked over one. And it
had profound and impenetrable reserves.

And the trainer's ups and downs in life, if all the stories were true,
had been amazing. At one time it was said that he was worth a cool
L100,000, and at another a minus quantity. But rich or poor, he never
changed his life by an iota, jogging soberly along his appointed if
somewhat tortuous way.

Old Mat was nothing if not a character. And if he was by no means more
scrupulous than the rest of his profession, he had certain steadfas