lanes. It was much the same, no doubt, as that of many
others who are from time to time pointed out to one as having been
aforetime in crack cavalry regiments and noted performers in the saddle;
men who have breathed into their lungs the wonder of the East, have
romped through life as through a cotillon, have had a thrust perhaps at
the Viceroy's Cup, and done fantastic horsefleshy things around the Gulf
of Aden. And then a golden stream has dried up, the sunlight has faded
suddenly out of things, and the gods have nodded "Go." And they have not
gone. They have turned instead to the muddy lanes and cheap villas and
the marked-down ills of life, to watch pear trees growing and to
encourage hens for their eggs. And Judkin was even as these others; the
wine had been suddenly spilt from his cup of life, and he had stayed to
suck at the dregs which the wise throw away. In the days of his scorn
for most things he would have stared the roan mare and her turn-out out
of all pretension to smartness, as he would have frozen a cheap claret
behind its cork, or a plain woman behind her veil; and now he was walking
stoically through the mud, in a tweed suit that would eventually go on to
the gardener's boy, and would perhaps fit him. The dear gods, who know
the end before the beginning, were perhaps growing a gardener's boy
somewhere to fit the garments, and Judkin was only a caretaker,
inhabiting a portion of them. That is what I like to think, and I am
probably wrong. And Judkin, whose clothes had been to him once more than
a religion, scarcely less sacred than a family quarrel, would carry those
parcels back to his villa and to the wife who awaited him and them--a
wife who may, for all we know to the contrary, have had a figure once,
and perhaps has yet a heart of gold--of nine-carat gold, let us say at
the least--but assuredly a soul of tape. And he that has fetched and
carried will explain how it has fared with him in his dealings, and if he
has brought the wrong sort of sugar or thread he will wheedle away the
displeasure from that leaden face as a pastrycook girl will drive
bluebottles off a stale bun. And that man has known what it was to coax
the fret of a thoroughbred, to soothe its toss and sweat as it danced
beneath him in the glee and chafe of its pulses and the glory of its
thews. He has been in the raw places of the earth, where the desert
beasts have whimpered their unthinkable psalmody, and their eyes have