He went well under the saddle; he was a beauty, and if
he had a voice, it was too great satisfaction in his personal
appearance.

One evening after tea, the young gentleman, who was about to drive Billy
out, stung by the reflection that he had not taken blackberries and
cream twice, ran into the house to repair the omission, and left Billy,
as usual, unhitched at the door. During his absence, Billy caught sight
of his stable, and involuntarily moved towards it. Finding himself
unchecked, he gently increased his pace; and when my friend, looking up
from the melon-patch which he was admiring, called out, "Ho, Billy!
Whoa, Billy!" and headed him off from the gap, Billy profited by the
circumstance to turn into the pear orchard. The elastic turf under his
unguided hoof seemed to exhilarate him; his pace became a trot, a
canter, a gallop, a tornado; the reins fluttered like ribbons in the
air; the phaeton flew ruining after. In a terrible cyclone the equipage
swept round the neighbor's house, vanished, reappeared, swooped down his
lawn, and vanished again. It was incredible.

My friend stood transfixed among his melons. He knew that his neighbor's
children played under the porte-cochere on the other side of the house
which Billy had just surrounded in his flight, and probably.... My
friend's first impulse was not to go and see, but to walk into his own
house, and ignore the whole affair. But you cannot really ignore an
affair of that kind. You must face it, and commonly it stares you out of
countenance. Commonly, too, it knows how to choose its time so as to
disgrace as well as crush its victim. His neighbor had people to tea,
and long before my friend reached the house the host and his guests were
all out on the lawn, having taken the precaution to bring their napkins
with them.

"The children!" gasped my friend.

"Oh, they were all in bed," said the neighbor, and he began to laugh.
That was right; my friend would have mocked at the calamity if it had
been his neighbor's. "Let us go and look up your phaeton." He put his
hand on the naked flank of a fine young elm, from which the bark had
just been stripped. "Billy seems to have passed this way."

At the foot of a stone-wall four feet high lay the phaeton, with three
wheels in the air, and the fourth crushed flat against the axle; the
willow back was broken, the shafts were pulled out, and Billy was gone.

"Good thing there was nobody in it," said the neighbor.

"Goo