CHAPTER V.
UNDER THE KEEPER'S TREE.
"You're a lad o' wax, my beauty!" cried Mr.Rake enthusiastically, surveying the hero of the Grand Military with adoring eyes as that celebrity, without a hair turned or a muscle swollen from his exploit, was having a dressing down after a gentle exercise.

"You've pulled it off, haven't you?
You've cut the work out for 'em! You've shown 'em what a luster is! Strike me a loser, but what a deal there is in blood.

The littlest pippin that ever threw a leg across the pigskin knows that in the stables; then why the dickens do the world run against such a plain fact out of it ?" And Rake gazed with worship at the symmetrical limbs of the champion of the "First Life," and plunged into speculation on the democratic tendencies of the age, as clearly contradicted by all the evidences of the flat and furrow, while Forest King drank a dozen go-downs of water, and was rewarded for the patience with which he had subdued his inclination to kick, fret, spring, and break away throughout the dressing by a full feed thrown into his crib, which Rake watched him, with adoring gaze, eat to the very last grain.
"You precious one!" soliloquized that philosopher, who loved the horse with a sort of passion since his victory over the Shires.

"You've won for the gentlemen, my lovely--for your own cracks, my boy!" And Rake, rendered almost melancholy by his thoughts, went out of the box to get into saddle and ride off on an errand of his master's to the Zu-Zu at her tiny hunting-lodge, where the snow-white ponies made her stud, and where she gave enchanting little hunting-dinners, at which she sang equally enchanting little hunting-songs, and arrayed herself, in the Fontainebleau hunting costume, gold-hilted knife and all, and spent Cecil's winnings for him with a rapidity that threatened to leave very few of them for the London season.

She was very pretty, sweetly pretty; with hair that wanted no gold powder, the clearest, sauciest eyes, and the handsomest mouth in the world; but of grammar she had not a notion, of her aspirates she had never a recollection, of conversation she had not an idea; of slang she had, to be sure, a repertoire, but to this was her command of language limited.