rreverent world. To be warm and dry, too, was
something. Piteous, they could yet afford to pity the horse. He was
more ludicrously, more painfully, misplaced than they. A real
blood-horse that has done his work is rightly left in the open
air--turned out into some sweet meadow or paddock. It would be cruel to
make him spend his declining years inside a house, where no grass is.
Is it less cruel that a fine old rocking-horse should be thrust from
the nursery out into the open air, upon the pavement?

Perhaps some child had just given the horse a contemptuous shove in
passing. For he was rocking gently when I chanced to see him. Nor did
he cease to rock, with a slight creak upon the pavement, so long as I
watched him. A particularly black and bitter north wind was blowing
round the corner of the street. Perhaps it was this that kept the horse
in motion. Boreas himself, invisible to my mortal eyes, may have been
astride the saddle, lashing the tired old horse to this futile
activity. But no, I think rather that the poor thing was rocking of his
own accord, rocking to attract my attention. He saw in me a possible
purchaser. He wanted to show me that he was still sound in wind and
limb. Had I a small son at home? If so, here was the very mount for
him. None of your frisky, showy, first-hand young brutes, on which no
fond parent ought to risk his offspring's bones; but a sound,
steady-going, well-mannered old hack with never a spark of vice in him!
Such was the message that I read in the glassy eye fixed on me. The
nostril of faded scarlet seemed for a moment to dilate and quiver. At
last, at last, was some one going to inquire his price?

Once upon a time, in a far-off fashionable toy-shop, his price had been
prohibitive; and he, the central attraction behind the gleaming
shop-window, had plumed himself on his expensiveness. He had been in no
hurry to be bought. It had seemed to him a good thing to stand there
motionless, majestic, day after day, far beyond the reach of average
purses, and having in his mien something of the frigid nobility of the
horses on the Parthenon frieze, with nothing at all of their unreality.
A coat of real chestnut hair, glossy, glorious! From end to end of the
Parthenon frieze not one of the horses had that.

From end to end of the toy-shop that exhibited him not one of the
horses was thus graced. Their flanks were mere wood, painted white,
with arbitrary blotches of grey here and there. Miserab