A fine chance was refused me by that very
superior man, Mr. Snidge, who wanted somebody
to be imprisoned twelve hours a day in his
surgery in Fetter-lane, and take the chance of
any recreation that might offer in the way of
dispensing, bleeding, and tooth-drawing. In
the eyes of Snidge I, Smilt, late of Smilt and
Plog, was too young for his place. His reason,
perhaps, may have been, that only an old, well-
seasoned, nicely torpid man, could have survived
a year of it. Then, there was a splendid
advertisement in the Times. "Apply at seven hundred
and ninety, Euston-square, between seven and
nine in the evening." Fifty of us were crammed
into a parlour, taking turns to walk into a study,
and pass muster before a man with a name very
well known to me. "What, Smilt!" "What,
Brown!" "This is no place, Smilt, for a man
like you." Delicate way of telling Smilt that
Brown would rather not.

"Meet me on Wednesday at the Great Prize
Cucumber Hotel in Exeter," wrote Jacob Hartiman,
to whose advertisement, dated from the
far west, I had replied. "You won't be so
absurd," said Robinson and Jones and Smith—
"you won't be so absurd as to post off upon a
wild-goose chase to Exeter upon the merest
chance of an engagement!" But I was so
absurd. I went to Exeter, and there for the first
time saw Hartiman, doctor and squire in his
own town. He is terribly old now, and I am
getting dim of sight. For forty years we have
been friends, and not the shadow of an unkind
thought has ever crept between us. Now, as
Hartiman has two legs, he is not one of the
subjects of this present revelation. But he had
twenty-eight legs—seven creatures upon four
legs—in his stable. "Can you ride?" he asked,
when we first met at Exeter. "In a gig," I
answered. "Never was upon a horse but once.
Nevertheless, whatever must be, can be. As
between horse and rider, one has to run and the
other to sit, I think I can sit."

Herein was a delusion; for, as Hartiman's
assistant, I was thrown once a week at first,
and afterwards pretty punctually once a quarter.
But who minds being spilt when scrambling
upon four legs up the everlasting
hills, or galloping under the greenwood and
over the breezy western roads? In the west, at
any rate, it never was my fate to be spilt
ignominiously at a patient's door. The discreetly
eternal silences were always the sole witnesses
to any disaster. Even the evidence of a broad
facing of road dirt did not matter very much in
friendly Somerton. If there was tattle in that
little town, I never heard it. To the best of my
ears, everybody loved his equals, and devoutly
believed in his superiors, reckoning superiority
by worldly wealth. Although in Somerton I
was not one of their roses, yet I lived near
one of their roses. I partook of the conventional
respect paid to Mr. Hartiman's worldly
position, and of the natural respect paid by all
people within twenty miles of our town, to his
frank and ever genial character. Moreover,
there was this. He had a notion that a country
gentleman ought to be able to break in his own
horses; so, he bought unbroken monsters who
kicked gigs to splinters, and impartially threw
over their necks, bad rider and good. If a man
cannot ride, and wishes to avoid exposure, let
him select a vicious and unmanageable horse
that would toss and tear a Ducrow. Whatever
may betide him, he will then be able to maintain
his self-respect under misfortune.

But these four-legged partners of my daily
rounds were really not to blame. I opened my
series of visits to the parish poor, in state,
attended by a groom in livery, who was to teach
me the country, and who was retained also by
various half-crowns in the capacity of riding-
master. My charger was a chesnut mare, who
never ran away with anybody. She had a mouth
hard as the muzzle of a cannon, and was almost
as much of an idiot as our poor, dear, departed
kitten. This animal, who must have heard
ghostly muezzins, threw me at sundry times by
dropping unexpectedly upon her knees; and
when she chose to go down on her knees, no act
of forecast short of tying her head to the bough
of a tree would prevent it. Whenever there
was a choice of two roads, the way most after
her heart was to stand still, and take neither.
I had no mind to make serious use of the whip:
for that is an article of manufacture in the
utility of which civilised man now puts, I
believe, little faith. As long as our mutual friend
Sniggles, the groom, went with us, a corner
could usually be turned in ten minutes, by
means of some little dismounting, leading,
pushing, and persuasion. When, however, I
was left alone with my four-legged friend, and
had to measure my own skill in argument
against that of a horse, truly we spent many a
meditative half-hour in the crossways under a
direction post. As long, however, as she was
not bothered by turnings, this good creature
went on, without stopping, at a tolerable
shambling pace, with a drop of a foot or a stumble
every two minutes. Whether there be a
mesmeric power in the mere act of attention, or
whether there were really some sense of the
bridle in the chesnut lady's mouth, I soon
observed that whenever I let my mind travel
beyond her ears, and, forgetting her paces,
thought about my patients and my posies,
though we might be trotting on the very
smoothest causeway, down we went.

Now, when I had thus learnt how needful it
is for a man to carry his thoughts, when riding,
in his horse's head, and keep his own head in
his pocket, other steeds were suffered to
become my acquaintances. There was an old
racer, who flew the rounds, and I liked him.
Once, on a hard turnpike road, he came down,
and shot me far ahead of him. The fault was
mine, for I was wearing my own head instead of
his; but we were both up in an instant, skull
uncracked and knees unbroken. The only
sorrow, worse than a bruised face, that came
of these acquaintances, was brought to me
by the great horse Teetotum. He was bony
and preposterously tall, and always span round