ment were worn with the dint of ponderous wheels, and
discoloured with iron-rust from them; here and there, in wandering
streaks over its surface, was the grey stain of the salt water with
which the street had been sprinkled.

After an interval of some minutes, which both men spent in looking
round the dash-board from opposite sides to watch the stride of the
horse, Bartley said, with a light sigh, "I had a colt once down in
Maine that stepped just like that mare."

"Well!" said Lapham, sympathetically recognising the bond that this
fact created between them. "Well, now, I tell you what you do. You
let me come for you 'most any afternoon, now, and take you out over the
Milldam, and speed this mare a little. I'd like to show you what this
mare can do. Yes, I would."

"All right," answered Bartley; "I'll let you know my first day off."

"Good," cried Lapham.

"Kentucky?" queried Bartley.

"No, sir. I don't ride behind anything but Vermont; never did. Touch
of Morgan, of course; but you can't have much Morgan in a horse if you
want speed. Hambletonian mostly. Where'd you say you wanted to get
out?"

"I guess you may put me down at the Events Office, just round the
corner here. I've got to write up this interview while it's fresh."

"All right," said Lapham, impersonally assenting to Bartley's use of
him as material.

He had not much to complain of in Bartley's treatment, unless it was
the strain of extravagant compliment which it involved. But the
flattery was mainly for the paint, whose virtues Lapham did not believe
could be overstated, and himself and his history had been treated with
as much respect as Bartley was capable of showing any one. He made a
very picturesque thing of the discovery of the paint-mine. "Deep in the
heart of the virgin forests of Vermont, far up toward the line of the
Canadian snows, on a desolate mountain-side, where an autumnal storm
had done its wild work, and the great trees, strewn hither and thither,
bore witness to its violence, Nehemiah Lapham discovered, just forty
years ago, the mineral which the alchemy of his son's enterprise and
energy has transmuted into solid ingots of the most precious of metals.
The colossal fortune of Colonel Silas Lapham lay at the bottom of a
hole which an uprooted tree had dug for him, and which for many years
remained a paint-mine of no more appreciable value than a soap-mine."

Here Bartley had not been able to forego another grin; bu