Had anybody told Danny Lowry that the gods had called him he would have stigmatized his informant as a liar—­yet they had.  For apart from any question of success or fame he had loved horses from the day when as a baby he had first sprawled in the straw of his Uncle Mike Aherne’s livery and hitching stable in Dublin City.  He had grown up to the scrape and whiffle of the currycomb, breathing ammonia, cracking the skin of his infantile knuckles with harness soap.  Out of the love that he bore for the beautiful dumb brutes grew an understanding that in time became almost uncanny.  All the jockeys and hostlers said there was magic in the lad’s hands.  He could ride anything on hoofs with a slack rein; and the worst biter in the stable would take a bridle from him as it were an apple.

“Oft, now, I hear him talkin’ to ’em, so I do.”  Mike Aherne was wont to say between spits.  “An’ they know what he says, I’m tellin’ ye.  He’s a charmer, he is; like the Whisperin’ Blacksmith.  You’ve heard tell of him, belike?  Well, Danny can spake to ’em widout even a whisper, so he can that!”

That was near seventy years agone, and now Danny was a shrunken little white-haired old wastrel who haunted Mulqueen’s Livery over on Twenty-fourth Street near Tenth Avenue, disappearing in and out of the cellar and loft and stalls like a leprechaun haunts a hollow tree.  Nobody knew where he had come from or where he lived except that he could always be found wherever there was a suffering animal, be it dog, cat or squirrel, and the rest of the time at Mulqueen’s, with whom he had an understanding about the telephone.  He was short, wiry, unshaven, with the legs of a jockey; and when he could get it he drank.  That, however, was not why he had left Ireland, which had had something to do with Phoenix Park; nor was it the cause of the decline of his fortunes, which had been the coming of the motor.

Some day a story must be written called The Hitching Post, about those thousands of little cast-iron negro boys who stand so patiently on the green grass strips along village streets waiting to hold long-forgotten bridle reins.  They lost their usefulness a decade or more ago, and so, by the same token and at the same time, did all that army of people who lived and moved and had their being by ministering to the needs of the horse.  The gas engine was to them what the mechanical bobbin was to the spinners of Liverpool and Belfast.  With the coming of the motor the race of coachmen, grooms and veterinaries began to perish from the earth.  Among the last was Danny Lowry, at the very zenith of his fortunes an unofficial vet to most of the swell stables belonging to the carriage people of Fifth Avenue.  One by one these stables had been converted into garages, and the broughams and C-spring victorias, the landaus and basket phaetons had been dragged to the auction room or shoved into dim corners to make room for snappy motors; and the horses Danny knew and loved so well had been sold or turned out to grass.