CHAPTER CXXXVI.

THE PEDIGREE AND BIRTH OF NOBS, GIVEN IN REPLY TO THE FIRST QUERY IN THE SECOND CHAPTER P. I.

Theo.   Look to my Horse, I pray you, well.

Diego. He shall Sir.

Inc.      Oh! how beneath his rank and call was that now!
            Your Horse shall be entreated as becomes
            A Horse of fashion, and his inches.
                                                        BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.

Who was Nobs?

A troop of British cavalry which had served on the continent was disbanded in the City of York, and the horses were sold. Their commander Sir Robert Clayton was a wealthy man, and happening to be a noble-minded man also, he could not bear to think that his old fellow campaigners, who had borne brave men to battle, should be ridden to death as butcher's hacks, or worked in dung-carts till they became dog's meat. So he purchased a piece of ground upon Knavesmire heath, and turned out the old horses to have their run there for life. There may be persons living who remember to have heard of this honourable act, and the curious circumstance which has preserved it from being forgotten. For once these horses were grazing promiscuously while a summer storm gathered, and when the first lightnings flashed from the cloud, and the distant thunder began to roll; but presently, as if they supposed these fires and sounds to be the signal of approaching battle, they were seen to get together and form in line, almost in as perfect order as if they had had their old masters upon their backs.

One of these old soldiers was what the Spaniards with the gravity peculiar to their language call a Caballo Padre; or what some of our own writers, with a decorum not less becoming, appellate an Entire horse;—or what a French interpreter accompanying an Englishman to obtain a passport wherein the horse as well as the rider was to be described, denominated un cheval de pierre to the astonishment of the clerks in the office, whose difficulty was not at all removed by the subsequent definition of the English applicant, which the said interpreter faithfully rendered thus, un cheval de pierre est un cheval qui couvre les officiers municipaux. He had found his way in a Cossack regiment from the Steppes of Tartary to the plains of Prussia; had run loose from a field of battle in which his master was killed, and passing from hand to hand had finally been sold by a Jew into the service of his majesty King George II. In the course of this eventful life he had lost his Sclavonic name, and when he entered the British regiment was naturalized by that of Moses in honour of his late possessor.

It so happened that a filly by name Miss Jenny had been turned out to recover from a sprain in a field sufficiently near Knavesmire Heath for a Houyhnhnm voice to be within hearing of Houyhnhnm ears. In this field did Miss Jenny one day beguile the solitude by exclaiming “heigh-ho for a husband!” an exclamation which exists in the Equine as well as in the English language. It is also found in the Feline tongue, but Grimalkin has set it to very unpleasant music. Moses heard the strain and listened to the voice of love. The breezes did for him what many a lover has in vain requested them to do in sonnet, and in elegy, and in song;—they wafted back his sympathetic wishes, and the wooing was carried on at a quarter of a mile distance: after which the Innamorato made no more of hedge and ditch than Jupiter was wont to do of a brazen Tower. Goonhilly in Cornwall was indebted for its once famous breed of horses to a Barb, which was turned loose (like Moses) by one of the Erisey family,—the Erisey estate joining the down.

A few days afterwards Miss Jenny having perfectly recovered of her sprain was purchased by Dr. Dove. The alteration which took place in her shape was so little that it excited no suspicion in any person:—a circumstance which will not appear extraordinary to those who remember that the great Mr. Taplin himself having once booked his expectations of a colt, kept the mare eleven lunar months and a fortnight by the Almanack, and then parted with her, after taking the opinion of almost every farmer and breeder in the country, upon an universal decision that she had no foal in her;—ten days afterwards the mare shewed cause why the decision of the judges should be reversed. Those persons, I say, who know the supereminent accuracy of Mr. Taplin, and that in matters of this kind every thing past under his own eye, (for he tells you that it was a trust which he never delegated to another), will not be so much surprised as the Doctor was at what happened on the present occasion. The Doctor and Nicholas were returning from Adwick-in-the-Street where they had been performing an operation. It was on the eleventh of June; the day had been unusually hot; they were overtaken by a thunderstorm, and took shelter in a barn. The Doctor had no sooner alighted than Miss Jenny appeared greatly distressed; and to the utter astonishment both of Dr. Dove and Nicholas, who could scarcely believe their own eyes, there was—almost as soon as they could take off the saddle—what I once saw called in the letter of a waiting gentlewoman—dishion to the family. To express the same event in loftier language,

Ἦλθεν δ᾿ υπὸ σπλάγχνων ὑπ ὠ——
    δῖνος τ᾽ ἐρατᾶς ΝΟΨ
Ες φάος ἀυτίκα._

It is for the gratification of the learned Thebans who will peruse this history that I quote Pindar here.