Most of those who saw Fred riding out of Middlemarch in company with

Bambridge and Horrock, on his way of course to Houndsley horse-fair,

thought that young Vincy was pleasure-seeking as usual; and but for an

unwonted consciousness of grave matters on hand, he himself would have

had a sense of dissipation, and of doing what might be expected of a

gay young fellow. Considering that Fred was not at all coarse, that he

rather looked down on the manners and speech of young men who had not

been to the university, and that he had written stanzas as pastoral and

unvoluptuous as his flute-playing, his attraction towards Bambridge and

Horrock was an interesting fact which even the love of horse-flesh

would not wholly account for without that mysterious influence of

Naming which determinates so much of mortal choice. Under any other

name than "pleasure" the society of Messieurs Bambridge and Horrock

must certainly have been regarded as monotonous; and to arrive with

them at Houndsley on a drizzling afternoon, to get down at the Red Lion

in a street shaded with coal-dust, and dine in a room furnished with a

dirt-enamelled map of the county, a bad portrait of an anonymous horse

in a stable, His Majesty George the Fourth with legs and cravat, and

various leaden spittoons, might have seemed a hard business, but for

the sustaining power of nomenclature which determined that the pursuit

of these things was "gay."

In Mr. Horrock there was certainly an apparent unfathomableness which

offered play to the imagination. Costume, at a glance, gave him a

thrilling association with horses (enough to specify the hat-brim which

took the slightest upward angle just to escape the suspicion of bending

downwards), and nature had given him a face which by dint of Mongolian

eyes, and a nose, mouth, and chin seeming to follow his hat-brim in a

moderate inclination upwards, gave the effect of a subdued unchangeable

sceptical smile, of all expressions the most tyrannous over a

susceptible mind, and, when accompanied by adequate silence, likely to

create the reputation of an invincible understanding, an infinite fund

of humor--too dry to flow, and probably in a state of immovable

crust,--and a critical judgment which, if you could ever be fortunate

enough to know it, would be _the_ thing and no other. It is a

physiognomy seen in all vocations, but perhaps it has never been more

powerful over the youth of England than in a judge of horses.

Mr. Horrock, at a question from Fred about his horse's fetlock, turned

sideways in his saddle, and watched the horse's action for the space of

three minutes, then turned forward, twitched his own bridle, and

remained silent with a profile neither more nor less sceptical than it

had been.




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