could not tell the kind of ear open to the gentle manly voice saying
things which the very sound of them made me long to hear. I confess to
hurrying my pace a little, but I trust with no improper curiosity, to
see--I cannot say the interlocutors, for I had heard, and still heard,
only one voice.

About a minute's walk brought me to the corner of the wood where it
stopped abruptly, giving way to a field of beautiful grass; and then I
saw something it does not need to be old to be delighted withal: the
boy that would not have taken pleasure in it, I should count half-way
to the gallows. Up to the edge of the wood came, I say, a large
field--acres on acres of the sweetest grass; and dividing it from both
wood and path stood a fence of three bars, which at the moment
separated two as genuine lovers as ever wall of "stones with lime and
hair knit up" could have sundered. On one side of the fence stood a
man whose face I could not see, and on the other one of the loveliest
horses I had ever set eyes upon. I am no better than a middling fair
horseman, but, for this horse's sake, I may be allowed to mention that
my friends will all have me look at any horse they think of buying.
He was over sixteen hands, with well rounded barrel, clean limbs,
small head, and broad muzzle; hollows above his eyes of hazy blue, and
delicacy of feature, revealed him quite an old horse. His ears pointed
forward and downward, as if they wanted on their own account to get a
hold of the man the nose was so busily caressing. Neither, I presume,
had heard my approach; for all true-love-endearments are shy, and the
man had his arm round the horse's neck, and was caressing his face,
talking to him much as Philip Sidney's lady, whose lips "seemed at
once to kiss and speak," murmured to her pet sparrow, only here the
voice was a musical baritone. That there was something between them
more than an ordinary person would be likely to understand appeared