THE HIGH-METTLED RACER. 325 



Till at last having labored, drudged early and late, 

 Bowed down by degrees, he bends to his fate ; 

 Blind, old and feeble, he tugs 'round a mill, 

 Or draws sand, till the sand of his hourglass stands 



still. 

 And now cold and lifeless, exposed to the view, 

 In the very same cart which he yesterday drew, 

 While the pitying crowd his sad relics surround, 

 The high-mettled racer is sold for the hounds. 



From other conversations I learned that Luke 

 Lightwood was born in a New Jersey town and ac- 

 quired a fair education for the period. Upon leaving 

 school his father wanted to apprentice him to a tailor, 

 but his mother objected. She decided that Luke was 

 cut out for the law, and as in such matters a woman 

 usually has her way, Luke was, as he termed it, 

 "articled" to a lawyer. As Luke had no taste for the 

 calling, he put in the most of his time reading Smollett 

 and Fielding and dreaming of the days still far away 

 in the future when he would be free to follow in the 

 footsteps of Tom Jones, providing he was as fortunate 

 with the ladies, Roderick Random or even Peregrine 

 Pickle. Being supplied with pocket money by his 

 mother, Luke ingratiated himself with a set of young 

 bloods who were striving to turn night into day, and 

 in time became so clever that he found his winnings 

 at the card table were greater than the amount ac- 

 quired by his system of practicing law. 



Luke left his native town when his mother died. 

 At that time he had enough knowledge of the law to 

 hang out a shingle in a frontier town, while at heart 

 he was a gambler, with that hunger for excitement 

 which comes with winning and losing, getting some- 



