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Updated: July 22, 2025
I missed his presence in the house, his pounding of the old piano with four dumb notes in the middle, as he bawled thereto rollicking sea and comic songs; I missed his energetic dissertations on spurs, whips, and blood-horses, and his spirited rendering of snatches of Paterson and Gordon, as he came in and out, banging doors and gates, teasing the cats and dogs and tormenting the children.
They were to be seen a good deal on the promenades outside the walls, where the Paduan ladies are driven in their carriages in the afternoon, and where one sees the blood-horses and fine equipages for which Padua is famous.
All that the Touaricks did with their camels was, they dressed them out most fantastically with various coloured leather harness, that is to say, the withers, neck, and head; they reined them up tightly like blood-horses; and then rode them a full trot in couples. This was the whole of the grand play with camels. Some, however, would not fall into this trot of couples, and grumbled terrifically.
You can tell a portrait from an ideal head, I suppose, and a true story from one spun out of the writer's invention. See whether this sounds true or not. Admiral Sir Isaac Coffin sent out two fine blood-horses, Barefoot and Serab by name, to Massachusetts, something before the time I am talking of.
The coaches were clean, trim, elegant, and glittering; the blood-horses were the finest that could be procured, groomed to perfection, and full of fire; the drivers and guards were tried and trusty men of mettle, in bright scarlet costume some of the former being lords, baronets, and even parsons!
Horses munched and snorted all about me, unseen hostlers hissed and whistled, and a man in a smart livery hung upon the bridles of two horses harnessed to a handsome closed travelling carriage, blood-horses that tossed proud heads and stamped impatient hoofs, insomuch that the groom alternately cursed and coaxed them, turning his head ever and anon to glance towards a certain back door of the inn with impatient expectancy.
Mark's in the arms of its high-breasted nurses, mighty country-women, who, in their bright costumes, their dangling chains, and head-dresses of gold and silver baubles, stride through the Piazza with the high, free- stepping movement of blood-horses, and look like the women of some elder race of barbaric vigor and splendor, which, but for them, had passed away from our puny, dull-clad times.
It was now Peter's turn to be silent; and as the two, with their little knot of district-visitors behind them, walk moodily along the great esplanade which overlooked the harbour, and then vanish suddenly up some dingy alley into the crowded misery of the sailors' quarter, we will leave them to go about their errand of mercy, and, like fashionable people, keep to the grand parade, and listen again to our two fashionable friends in the carved and gilded curricle with four white blood-horses.
Charioteers behind blood-horses bathed in foam; heads helmeted in flashing splendour; eyes all intent upon the track ahead, keen to anticipate the risks of headlong speed and warn the dilatory straggler from its path.
You can tell a portrait from an ideal head, I suppose, and a true story from one spun out of the writer's invention. See whether this sounds true or not. Admiral Sir Isaac Coffin sent out two fine blood-horses, Barefoot and Serab by name, to Massachusetts, something before the time I am talking of.
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