They ate the sandwiches and cheese, and upon the guest was conferred the cake.  There were three pieces, and he managed the first swiftly, but was compelled to linger on the second, even with the lubricating help of another cup of milk.

“Bring it along,” directed the host.  So it was brought along to the buggy, one piece in course of consumption and one carried to be eaten at superb leisure as the fed roan carried them down the hot road to still another farm.

They drove back to Newbern in the late afternoon, still largely silent, though there was a little talk at the close on stretches of hill where the roan would consent to slacken his pace.

“What you think of him?” Sharon demanded, nodding obliquely at the roan.

“He’s got good hocks and feet—­good head and shoulders, too,” said the boy.

“He has that,” affirmed Sharon.  “Know horses?”

“Well, I—­”

He faltered, but suddenly warmed to talk and betrayed an intimate knowledge of every prominent horse in Newbern.  He knew Charley and Dick, the big dray horses; and Dexter, who drew the express wagon; he knew Bob and George, who hauled the ice wagon; he knew the driving horses in the Mansion stables by name and point, and especially the two dapple grays that drew the bus.  Not for nothing had he listened to the wise talk in the stable office, or sat at the feet of Starling Tucker, who knew horses so well he called them hawses.  It was the first time he had talked to Sharon forgetfully.  Sharon nodded his head from time to time, and the boy presently became shy at the consciousness that he had talked a great deal.

Then Sharon spoke of rumours that the new horseless carriage would soon do away with horses.  He didn’t believe the rumours, and he spoke scornfully of the new machines as contraptions.  Still he had seen some specimens in Buffalo, and they might have something in them.  They might be used in time in place of horse-drawn busses and ice wagons and drays.  Wilbur was chilled by this prediction.  He had more than half meant to drive horses to one of these useful affairs, but what if they were to be run by machinery?  Linotypes to spoil typesetting by hand, and now horseless carriages to stop driving horses!  He wondered if it would be any use to learn any trade.  He would have liked to ask Sharon, but hardly dared.

“Well, it’s an age of progress,” said Sharon at last.  “We got to expect changes.”

Wilbur was at home on this topic.  He became what Winona would have called informative.

“We can’t stop change,” he said in his father’s manner.  “First, there was star dust, and electricity or something made it into the earth; and some water and chemicals made life out of this electricity or something——­”

“Hey?” said the startled Sharon, but the story of creation continued.

“And there was just little animals first, but they got to be bigger, because they had to change; and pretty soon they become monkeys, and then they changed some more, and stood up on their hind feet, and so they got to be human beings like us—­because—­because they had to change,” he concluded, lucidly.