108 CONFFSSIONS OP A HORSE DEALER. 



besides the manager of the livery-stable keeper in 

 fact, there were but few gentlemen in the neighbour- 

 hood who had not through their grooms bought and 

 paid for this man by weight many times over. 



The result of this business was the forfeiture of a 

 sum of money by the hay salesman to the proprietor, 

 which was preferred as more profitable than a prosecu- 

 tion, and the dismissal of the manager, who now was 

 turned completely adrift, shunned and despised by 

 everybody who knew him. He had, however, as I 

 have said before, a superabundance of low cunning, and 

 very soon after the occurrence of the above events, he 

 left the town and allied himself to a gang of trotting 

 copers, by whose assistance he concocted another scheme 

 to swindle his late generous and forgiving master, the 

 brewer's traveller. 



The scoundrel knew, to the second, in what time the 

 bay mare, before alluded to, could trot a mile at her 

 most clipping pace viz., three and a-half minutes; 

 but the trotting copers possessed a horse they called 

 Dusty Bob, that could trot a mile in considerably less 

 than three minutes, and getting the necessary informa- 

 tion from their new man as to the whereabouts of the 

 traveller on a certain day, two of them started with 

 Dusty Bob harnessed to a gig, to the rendezvous, and 

 awaited his coming ; and in due time up he dashed with 

 the bay mare at a spanking pace, and pulled up opposite 

 the bar-parlour window of the inn, where the two 

 copers sat, one of whom had alighted from the gig a 



