I bet your daddy and your mother cantered away with the ribbons in their day." Michael was for growing restless at such searching examination, but Daughtry, in the midst of feeling out the lines and build of the thighs and hocks, paused and took Michael's tail in his magic fingers, exploring the muscles among which it rooted, pressing and prodding the adjacent spinal column from which it sprang, and twisting it about in a most daringly intimate way.

And Michael was in an ecstasy, bracing his hindquarters to one side or the other against the caressing fingers.

With open hands laid along his sides and partly under him, the man suddenly lifted him from the ground.

But before he could feel alarm he was back on the ground again.
"Twenty-six or -seven--you're over twenty-five right now, I'll bet you on it, shillings to ha'pennies, and you'll make thirty when you get your full weight," Dag Daughtry told him.

"But what of it?
Lots of the judges fancy the thirty-mark.