My wife has discovered a little steed for us. He is called Jack, which is just as it should be, because his second name is Ass, and he is a sort of honorary member of the Bunting family—close neighbours of ours. Among beasts of draught this ass is surely one of the highly fortunate. He lives a life which has hitherto been lived only by the horses of sporting fiction. Roland, who carried a certain prosy-poetic, indomitable fellow from Ghent to Aix or from Aix to Ghent, may have been allowed in recognition of his services to spend thus the evening of his days. And in the last chapter of The Starting Gate we shall certainly find the dear old Druid cropping the lush grass of the Manor paddock or accepting sugar from the dainty hand of his mistress while the Squire stands by and recounts for the seventeen-hundredth time the story of the noble brute's last race, when, lame in the near hind, he won the Cup for his owner,
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