It was the first time he had justified his air of managing the whole concern round which he barked and bounded and scurried as though Methusalem and Jinny were his minions. He had indeed commandeered them—jumping originally out of nowhere on to the tail-board—and however he strayed from the path of their duty in his numberless tangential excursions and expeditions, they knew he would never abandon them.

Like many other great characters Nip was a mongrel. His foundation was fox-terrier, and he had preserved the cleverness of the strain without its pluck. To strangers, indeed, he seemed a very David among dogs, attacking, as he sometimes did, canine Goliaths. But no dog is a hero to his mistress, and after he had adopted her, Jinny discovered that these resounding assaults on the bulkier were but bravado passages, based on his flair that the bigger dog was also the bigger coward. That was where his brains came in, as well as his baser breed. A sniff at a real fighter and Nip would evade combat, sauntering off with a nonchalant air. A splash of brown on his brainpan and about his ears, and a dab of black on his snout were—with his leathern collar—the sole touches of relief in his sleek whiteness. His head—beautifully poised and shaped—with its bright dark-brown eye, eloquently expressive and passing easily from love to greediness, from shyness to shame, invited many a pat from lovers of the soulful. Yet to hear him bolt a rabbit was to imagine a demon on the war-path: in a flash the cart would be left a furlong behind or athwart; his raucous staccato yells filled the meadows with echoes of blood-lust and revenge. But long experience had dulled Jinny’s solicitude for Bunny: never once was there a sign of a kill. Sometimes, indeed, when Nip was hunting a rat, the creature would run across the path under his very nose, but that nose, pushing eagerly for far-off game, never seemed able to readjust itself to what was under it. All the which maladroitness was probably artfulness, Nip scenting shrewdly that a successful sports-dog would have been hounded out. He knew well the foolish, treacherous heart of his mistress, who actually misled the hunt those autumn mornings that brought the high-mettled hares across their path with ears taut and every muscle tragically astrain. Up would come the beagles, with a long processional flutter of waving white tails, nosing forlornly and barking dismally, while he—panting to put them right—was tied paw and paw. How they set him quivering, those horn-tootlings of the gorgeous Master, though they did not go to his bowels as much as those staccato chivies that suggested that the green-and-white gentleman was one of themselves rather than a biped, or as those more elaborately contorted cries and rousing thong-cracks of the Whipper-in. A fellow-feeling makes us wondrous kind. And when all these hunters—four-footed or two-footed—including the draggletail of fat, breathless farmers and wheezing females, were remorselessly sent the wrong way by his brutal mistress, the poor dog could not refrain from wailing.

Even when the hare did not cross her path, her horn, imitating the professional toot, would allure and misguide the distant dogs. Nip’s own relatives, the foxhounds, more rarely came his way, but though his mistress’s sympathies with the quarry were less marked—her chickens being precious—Nip was still held in. But amid all his disgust the cunning dog remembered that his days of foraging for himself—before he had picked up Jinny—had not been rosy and replete: caterers like Jinny, he realized, did not grow on every cart, not to mention the cushioned basket from which he could bark at everything on the road, or within which, with a huge grunt of satisfaction, he could curl into an odorous dream.

A contrast in all save colour was the stolid Methusalem, though he too was of hybrid stock. While his hairy fetlocks proclaimed a kinship with the draught-breed of the shire, he lacked that gross spirit, and while his flying mane and tail flaunted an affinity with the fiery Arab, he was equally deficient in that high mettle. By what romantic episode he had come into being, whether through the wild oats of an Arabian ancestor, or the indiscretion of a mere circus-horse, or whether his tossing hair and tail were the heritage from a Shetland pony—as his moderate stature suggested—is not recorded in any stud-book. But it was impossible to see him without the word “steed” coming into the mind, and equally impossible to sit behind him without thinking of a plough-horse. “When Oi first see that rollin’ in the brook afore ’twas broke in,” Gaffer Quarles would relate, “Oi was minded of the posters of Mazeppa at the Fair, and christened that accordin’.” It was only when he discovered that this blonde beast was a whited sepulchre, that “Mazeppa” was exchanged for “Methusalem,” as though that antediluvian worthy had always been a doddering millenarian, and not at one time in the prime of his hundreds. The name had at least the effect of banishing expectation; his mere amble was an agreeable surprise. As a matter of fact Methusalem had still his Mazeppa moments. They came on Tuesday and Friday evenings when he was loosed from the shafts; at which moments he would roll on his back, kick up his heels and gallop madly round the goat-pasture to the alarm of the tethered browsers. And even at his professional pace he always kept his mane flying. One accomplishment, however, Methusalem had which no “Mazeppa” steed could have bettered, nay, which made a circus pedigree plausible. He could lift the latch of gates with his nose and walk through. It was a trick which Jinny, with her habit of not alighting, had fostered in him: if the gate did not swing to, she could usually close it with the butt-end of her whip—through the cart-rear at the worst—a procedure which, with her further habit of using short cuts and even private tracks like that at Bellropes Park, saved not a little time, and was some compensation for Methusalem’s general crawl.

If the local carrying business had grown indistinguishable from Jinny, it seemed no less bound up with her four-footed companions, whose ghostly figures, seen looming through the wintry dusk, sent a glow of warmth through the bleak countryside.