WILTS AND HORSES 327 



change from a petted jockey s life to bossing a 

 roadside shanty, nine miles from a town and four 

 from a village no bigger than a hamlet ! 



I suggested to my host, who took a lot of 

 trouble to shepherd me over the district — where, 

 barring the early wheatears, the grey plovers, 

 flocks of larks and shoals of rabbits, and a fine 

 foss and vallum, there was not another Christian 

 soul to speak to — that I knew how it was he 

 pulled John M.P.'s spine out to be its proper 

 length and a half. ''That," says I, "is the dolls' 

 secret, the secret of the movable barrier. It is 

 like the milkmaid's beginning with lifting the 

 newly born calf, and by virtue of doing the same 

 every morning, not noticing its increase even 

 when it is a great big fat bullock — you keep at it, 

 you see ; that is where it is. Now, with John 

 M.P. and these dolls," I says to his master, says 

 I, "you have been putting the shifting-guard 

 rails out and out, an inch at a time, after the 

 fashion of boys playing footit — that interesting 

 game which costs parents so much in caps. The 

 inches have accumulated till the poor deluded 

 animal has been taking off in the next field or 

 the next parish, and the while not knowing he was 

 doing anything extraordinary. Of course nature 

 always adapts herself to circumstances and her 

 children's requirements ; so in these extending 

 exercises John has telescoped — or, rather, 

 untelescoped — himself to the length of a street. 



Now behold the irony of fate ! At the end of 

 my visit I was kindly driven round on the downs 

 between Cranborne and Woodyates, and landed 

 finally some half-mile below the latter isolated 

 outpost, with a clear run of nine miles or so into 

 Salisbury. I had heard that Mr Thursby was 



