to sleep with Terrail's "Club des
Valets de Coeur," and slept in ten minutes' time as composedly as though
he had inherited fifty thousand a year.

That evening, in the loose-box down at Royallieu, Forest King stood
without any body-covering, for the night was close and sultry, a lock of
the sweetest hay unnoticed in his rack, and his favorite wheaten-gruel
standing uncared-for under his very nose; the King was in the height
of excitation, alarm, and haughty wrath. His ears were laid flat to his
head, his nostrils were distended, his eyes were glancing uneasily with
a nervous, angry fire rare in him, and ever and anon he lashed out his
heels with a tremendous thundering thud against the opposite wall, with
a force that reverberated through the stables and made his companions
start and edge away. It was precisely these companions that the
aristocratic hero of the Soldiers' Blue Ribbon scornfully abhorred.

They had just been looking him over--to their own imminent peril; and
the patrician winner of the Vase, the brilliant six-year-old of Paris,
and Shire and Spa steeple-chase fame, the knightly descendant of the
White Cockade blood and of the coursers of Circassia, had resented the
familiarity proportionately to his own renown and dignity. The King was
a very sweet-tempered horse, a perfect temper, indeed, and ductile to
a touch from those he loved; but he liked very few, and would suffer
liberties from none. And of a truth his prejudices were very just; and
if his clever heels had caught--and it was not his fault that they
did not--the heads of his two companions, instead of coming with that
ponderous crash into the panels of his box, society would certainly have
been no loser, and his owner would have gained more than had ever before
hung in the careless balance of his life.

But the iron heels, with their shining plates, only caught the oak of
his box-door; and the tete-a-tete in the sultry, oppressive night went
on as the speakers moved to a prudent distance; one of them thoughtfully
chewing a bit of straw, after the immemorial habit of grooms, who ever
seem as if they had been born into this world with a cornstalk ready in
their mouths.

"It's almost a pity--he's in such perfect condition. Tip-top. Cool as
a cucumber after the longest pipe-opener; licks his oats up to the last
grain; leads the whole string such a rattling spin as never was spun
but by a Derby cracker before him. It's almost a pity," said Will