heart, the frankest hand, the best judge of a horse, and the handsomest
man that ever did honour to Hounslow!"

"For all that," returned the hostler, shaking his palsied head, and
turning back to the tap-room,--"for all that, master, his time be up.
Mark my whids, Captain Lovett will not be over the year,--no, nor mayhap
the month!"

"Why, you old rascal, what makes you so wise? You will not peach, I
suppose!"

"I peach! Devil a bit! But there never was the gemman of the road,
great or small, knowing or stupid, as outlived his seventh year. And
this will be the captain's seventh, come the 21st of next month; but he
be a fine chap, and I'll go to his hanging!"

"Fish!" said the robber, peevishly,--he himself was verging towards the
end of his sixth year,--"pish!"

"Mind, I tells it you, master; and somehow or other I thinks--and I has
experience in these things--by the fey, of his eye and the drop of his
lip, that the captain's time will be up to-day!"

[Fey--A word difficult to translate; but the closest interpretation
of which is, perhaps, "the ill omen."]

Here the robber lost all patience, and pushing the hoary boder of evil
against the wall, he turned on his heel, and sought some more agreeable
companion to share his stirrup-cup.