But there was nobody to turn Danny out to grass.  He had to keep going.  So he had drifted lower and lower, passing from the private stable to the trucking stable, and from the trucking stable to the last remaining decrepit boarding and liveries of the remote West Side.  The tragedy of the horse is the tragedy of all who loved them.  Danny was one of these tragedies, but he still picked up a precarious living by doing odd jobs at Mulqueen’s and acting as a veterinary when called upon, and he could generally be found either loafing in the smelly little office or smoking his T D pipe on the steps outside.

He and Mr. Ephraim Tutt, the lawyer, who lived in the rickety old house with the tall windows and piazzas protected by railings of open ironwork round which twisted the stems of extinct wistarias, had long been friends.  Many a summer evening the two old men had sat together and discoursed of famous jockeys and still more famous horses, of Epsom and Ascot, until Mr. Tutt’s cellaret was empty and never a stogy left in the box at all.  Probably no one save the odd lanky old attorney, who himself seemed to belong to a bygone era, knew the story of Danny’s glorious past—­how he had risen from his Uncle Aherne’s livery in Dublin first to being paddock groom to Lord Ashburnham and then to jockey, finally to ride the Derby under the Farringdon gold and crimson, and to carry away Katherine Brady, the second housemaid, as Mrs. Lowry when he went back to Dublin with a goodly pile of money to take over his uncle’s business; and how thereafter had come babies, and fever, and the epizootic, and hard times; and Danny, a heartbroken man, had fled from bereavement and pauperism and possibly from prison to seek his fortune in America.  And then the motor!  Lastly, now, a hand-to-mouth, furtive, ignorant old age, a struggle for bare existence and to keep the tiny flat going for his seventeen-year-old granddaughter, Katie, who kept house for him and of whose existence few, even of Danny’s friends, were aware excepting Mr. Tutt.

There was, in fact, a striking parallel between these two old men, the one so ignorant, the other so essentially a man of culture, in that they were both humanitarians in a high sense.  It is improbable that Ephraim Tutt was conscious of what drew him to Danny Lowry, but drawn he was; and the reason for it was that the fundamental mainspring of the life of each was love—­in the case of the man of law for those of his fellow men who suffered through foolishness or poverty or weaknesses or misfortune; and in that of his more humble counterpart, whose limitations precluded his understanding of more endowed human beings, for the dumb animals, who must mutely suffer through the foolishness or poverty or weakness or misfortune of their owners and masters.