t, and the
belief that he should never find such another. Yet he was not without a
philanthropist's consolation. He had added to the stock of harmless
pleasures in a degree of which he could not have dreamed. All his
acquaintance knew that he had bought a horse, and they all seemed now to
conspire in asking him how he got on with it. He was forced to confess
the truth. On hearing it, his friends burst into shouts of laughter, and
smote their persons, and stayed themselves against lamp-posts and
house-walls. They begged his pardon, and then they began again, and
shouted and roared anew. Since the gale which blew down the poet ----'s
chimneys and put him to the expense of rebuilding them, no joke so
generally satisfactory had been offered to the community. My friend had,
in his time, achieved the reputation of a wit by going about and and
saying, "Did you know ----'s chimneys had blown down?" and he had now
himself the pleasure of causing the like quality of wit in others.

Having abandoned the hope of getting anything out of the people who had
sold him Billy, he was for a time the prey of an inert despair, in which
he had not even spirit to repine at the disorder of a universe in which
he could not find a horse. No horses were now offered to him, for it had
become known throughout the trade that he had bought a horse. He had
therefore to set about counteracting this impression with what feeble
powers were left him. Of the facts of that period he remembers with
confusion and remorse the trouble to which he put the owner of the
pony-horse Pansy, whom he visited repeatedly in a neighboring town, at a
loss of time and money to himself, and with no result but to embarrass
Pansy's owner in his relations with people who had hired him and did not
wish him sold. Something of the old baffling mystery hung over Pansy's
whereabouts; he was with difficulty produced, and when _en evidence_ he
was not the Pansy my friend had expected. He paltered with his regrets;
he covered his disappointment with what pretenses he could; and he
waited till he could telegraph back his adverse decision. His conclusion
was that, next to proposing marriage, there was no transaction of life
that involved so many delicate and complex relations as buying a horse,
and that the rupture of a horse-trade was little less embarrassing and
distressing to all concerned than a broken engagement. There was a
terrible intimacy in the affair; it was alarmingly personal.