“He _looks_ a clipper! don’t he, Isaac?” observed the master, nodding towards the roan’s long shapely quarters and square tail. “The rarest shaped one we’ve had in _this_ stable for many a day,” he added, seeing his servant’s features screwed into the well-known twist that denoted disapprobation.
“Looks!” grunted Isaac, who never called his master “sir.” “Looks! Ah! he’d be a nice thing enough to knock a light trap about, or do you a day now and then when the country gets dry. He’ll never be fit for our ploughs—you see if he will! They’ll pull him to pieces in a fortnight—you see if they won’t!”
“I don’t _want_ him for our ploughs,” answered Mr. Sawyer, waxing somewhat impatient. “I don’t think I shall have another day in the Old Country this year. Look ye here, Isaac. I’m going to move the horses. I’ve three now, let alone ‘Jack’” (this was an abbreviation for the hack who seldom enjoyed his fall name, being generally designated as above, or as “The Dandy”)—“three right good ones. I can easily pick up another, when I’m settled. I’m going down to the grass.”
“Grass!” grunted the listener. “Where be that?”
“Well, I’m going to see what sport they have in the Shires,” answered his master, warming up with the subject—“going to have a look at Mr. Tailby and the Earl of Stamford and Warrington, and try if I can’t make a fight good enough to see those Pytchley bitches run into their fox. I’m going to Market Harborough, Isaac. Such horses as mine are wasted in this out-of-the-way country. Why, the grey’s the best I’ve ever had; and the roan ought to be faster than he; and even the bay would carry me better, I think, in that country than he does here.”
A gleam as of pity softened old Isaac’s hard blue eyes, as it rested on Marathon tucking in his feed, and he pictured that devoted animal rolling and lurching, disconsolate, over the ridge-and-furrow of a fifty-acre grass-field. But he only observed sardonically,
“Markit Harboro’, is it? To stand at the sign of the ‘Hand-in-Pocket,’ I suppose?”
“Never mind what you suppose!” answered Mr. Sawyer, now positively angry. “You do what I bid you. Move the horses down to-morrow by the rail. Take The Boy with you; and mind you keep him out of mischief. I’ve written to a friend of mine to engage stables. Next week we’ll begin work in right earnest. Come into the house, with your book, after your dinner; and hold your tongue!”