doorway. It was good to see him
sniff the cool air, his coat shining like a maid's ribbons, and then
rise on his hind legs and strike out at nothing for the sheer pleasure
of being alive on this October day. And it was good to see him plunge
his head up to the eyepits into the sparkling water and gulp it down,
and then blow the clinging drops out of his nostrils.

El Mahdi, if beyond the stars somewhere in those other Hills of the
Undying I am not to find you, I shall not care so very greatly if the
last sleep be as dreamless as the wise have sometimes said it is.

I spread the thick saddle-blanket and pulled it out until it touched his
grey withers, and taking the saddle by the horn swung it up on his back,
straightened the skirts and drew the two girths tight, one of leather
and one of hemp web. Then I climbed into the saddle, and we rode out
under the apple trees.

Simon Betts stood in his door as we went by, and called us a "God
speed." Straight, honourable old man. He was a lantern in the Hills. He
was good to me when I was little, and he was good to Ward. In the place
where he is gone, may the Lord be good to him!

We stopped to open the old gate, an ancient landmark of the early time,
made of locust poles, and swinging to a long beam that rested on a huge
post in perfect balance. Easily pushed open, it closed of its own
weight. A gate of striking artistic fitness, now long crumbled with the
wooden plough and the quaint pack-saddles of the tall grandsires.

We rode south in the early daylight. Jud whistled some old song the
words of which told about a jolly friar who could not eat the fattest
meat because his stomach was not first class, but believed he could
drink with any man in the Middle Ages,--a song doubtless learned at
Roy's tavern when the Queens and the Alkires and the Coopmans of the
up-country got too much "spiked" cider under their waistbands. I heard
it first, and others of its kidney, on the evening that old Hiram Arnold
bet his saddle against a twenty-dollar gold piece, that he could divide
ninety cattle so evenly that there would not be fifty pounds difference
in weight between the two droves, and did it, and with the money bought
the tavern dry. And the crowd toasted him:

"Here's to those who have half joes, and have a heart to spend 'em;
But damn those who have whole joes, and have no heart to spend 'em."

On that night, in my youthful eyes, old Hiram was a hero out of the
immorta