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Updated: June 2, 2025
Henceforth I will have nothing to do with you, you cobbler, you dirty blacksmith! Porphyri, go and tell the ostler to give the gentleman's horses no oats, but only hay." This development Chichikov had hardly expected. "And do you," added Nozdrev to his guest, "get out of my sight."
But when the bargain had been struck and John Paul gone with the 'ostler to see to his chests, mine host thought it a pity not to have a fall out of me. "So ye be the Buckskin laud," he said, with a wink at a leering group of farmers; "ye hae braw gentles in America." He was a man of sixty or thereabout, with a shrewd but not unkindly face that had something familiar in it.
Fancy was ushered into a little tea-room, and Dick went to the stables to see to the feeding of Smart. In face of the significant twitches of feature that were visible in the ostler and labouring men idling around, Dick endeavoured to look unconscious of the fact that there was any sentiment between him and Fancy beyond a tranter's desire to carry a passenger home.
"They do say," said I mockingly, "as how Swift Nicks is a good hand at splicing fishing-rods." "I never 'eerd tell of that'n," said the stolid ostler. "Are you really Swift Nicks, sir?" asked the lad, looking steadily at me with frank, innocent eyes. "No more than you are Jonathan Wild or Prester John, my son," I answered. "Then who are you?" he persisted. "I'm a poor splicer of fishing-rods.
"The old man is a trifle out of sorts," the ostler ventured to remark, as they entered the yard together. "Perchance so," returned the other, "but that is no affair of thine; but an you keep good care of his horse he will think well of thee." "Yes, yes; certainly!" replied the man, grinning. "I always look well after gentlemen's horses, I do. You'll not be wanting them in the morning, I suppose?
But now, now that the matter had been put before him in this way, might it not become him, as a gentleman, to fall in love with so very beautiful a woman, whose name had already been linked with his own? We all know that story of the priest, who, by his question in the confessional, taught the ostler to grease the horses' teeth. "I never did yet," said the ostler, "but I'll have a try at it."
If they could have left their perfume behind, together with the profanity, our table would have been sweeter; but the flannel shirts were seldom washed, to prevent shrinking, just as their owners seldom spoke, to avoid swearing; an overpowering smell of horses was emitted by the driver, and of stables by the ostler, while the proprietor exhaled the mixed but indescribable odours combined from his various duties, such as cooking, cleaning up, sleeping in his clothes, and never washing them.
Having once selected this he proceeded straightway to climb over the impeding bundles to reach it from the corner where the ostler had tossed it just before. This, however, proved no slight task. He was burly and heavy, while the bundles were frail and loosely stacked and failed to yield to his feet that amount of support which, of all men, the stouter ones are supposed most to require.
A butcher's boy looked far too earnestly at the extra shadow, and his big, liver-coloured lurcher snuffed at the legs of that shadow's mistress and whined uncomfortably. "Get behind me," said Kathleen; "then our two shadows will look like one." But Mabel's shadow, very visible, fell on Kathleen's back, and the ostler of the Davenant Arms looked up to see what big bird had cast that big shadow.
After eating as much as I wanted, as I felt very tired, I made up a bed for myself with some straw, and putting the remainder of my meal into my handkerchief to serve as a pillow, laid myself down, and the ostler having given me a rug to pull over me, I slept soundly there the whole night.
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