color he could easily have taken
any premium put up for homeliness, being an ashen roan, mottled with
black and patches of divers hue. But his legs were flat and corded like
a racer's, his neck long and thin as a thoroughbred's, his nostrils
large, his ears sharply pointed and lively, while the white rings around
his eyes hinted at a cross, somewhere in his pedigree, with Arabian
blood. A huge, bony, homely-looking horse he was as he drew the deacon
and Miranda into the village on market days and Sundays, with a loose,
shambling gait, making altogether an appearance so homely and peculiar
that the smart village chaps, riding along in their jaunty turn-outs,
used to chaff the good deacon on the character of the steed, and
satirically challenge him to a brush. The deacon always took the
badinage in good part, although he inwardly said, more than once, "If I
ever get a good chance, when there ain't too many around, I'll go up to
the turn of the road beyond the church and let Jack out on them;" for
Dick had given him a hint of the horse's history, and told him "he could
knock the spots out of thirty," and wickedly urged the deacon to take
the shine out of them airy chaps some of these days.

Such was the horse, then, that the deacon had ahead of him and the
old-fashioned sleigh when, with the parson alongside, he struck into
the principal street of the village.

New Year's day is a lively day in many country villages, and on this
bright one especially, as the sleighing was perfect, everybody was out.
Indeed, it had got noised abroad that certain trotters of local fame
were to be on the street that afternoon and, as the boys worded it,
"There would be heaps of fun going on." So it happened that everybody in
town, and many who lived out of it, were on that particular street, and
just at the hour, too, when the deacon came to the foot of it, so that
the walk on either side was lined darkly with lookers-on and the smooth
snow path between the two lines looked like a veritable home-stretch on
a race day.

[Illustration: "_Hillow, Deacon, aren't you going to shake out Old
Shamble-Heels, to-day?_"]

Now, when the deacon had reached the corner of the main street and
turned into it, it was at that point where the course terminated and the
"brushes" were ended, and at the precise moment when the dozen or twenty
horses that had come flying down were being pulled up preparatory to
returning at a slow gait to the customary starting