ABOUT BUYING A HORSE. 47 



" O ! " the Station-Master will cut in, to avoid further 

 explanation. " Yes, and I told him he'd better see you 

 about it himself." 



And so he will go off, leaving his companion to understand 

 that he, the Station-Master, won't be a party to any duplicity 

 about this horse, and isn't, to put it plainly, going to stand 

 in with Fossit of Barntree. 



Again, in the village, I hear of it from the Post-Master. 

 In partnership with his mother, he is proprietor of a cheese, 

 bacon, and grocery shop, and this, and the post-office, they 

 manage between them. He is a long young man, loosely 

 put together, as if he'd been made up gradually, and added 

 to at different times whenever there might have been some 

 large bones to spare. His face, which is broad and round, 

 and with a very uneven surface, is expressive of chronic 

 astonishment at everything and everybody. I don't believe 

 he was always like this. 



I fancy the telegraphic arrangements have frightened him, 

 and that every arrival, or sending of a telegram, conveys a 

 fresh galvanic shock to his nervous system, taking effect on 

 his hair, which is very dry, and of the colour of one of his 

 own pale Dutch cheeses. He has a desk to himself in one 

 corner, where he attends to the Money Orders, occasionally 

 disappearing, when the customer's back is turned, to come 

 up again in the character of a Telegraphic Clerk, in another 

 corner, where the wires work among sides of bacon, sacks of 

 dog-biscuits, soap, cheeses, and red herrings. From this 

 operation he emerges quite red in the face, as though they 

 were saying such things by telegraph that no respectable 



