"Why, my good fellow, old Widderin, to be sure." "Bless me!" I said; "You don't mean to say that that old horse is alive still ?" "He looks like it," said the major.

"He'd carry you a mile or two, yet." "I thought he had died while I was in England," I said.

"Ah, major, that horse's history would be worth writing." "If you began," answered the major, "to write the history of the horse, you must write also the history of every body who was concerned in those circumstances which caused Sam to take a certain famous ride upon him.

And you would find that the history of the horse would be reduced into very small compass, and that the rest of your book would assume proportions too vast for the human intellect to grasp." "How so ?" I said.
He entered into certain details, which I will not give.

"You would have," he said, "to begin at the end of the last century, and bring one gradually on to the present time.