I was a handsome lad, handsome and bold, who rode into life wearing boots and spurs, whip in hand and blood in his veins, mounted on a swift, strong, skittish steed, just like a steed out of an old ballad, the kind the Romantics went looking for in a medieval castle, only to find it here in the streets of our own century. The trouble is, they rode the horse too hard, and, in the end, abandoned it by the roadside, where it was found by the realists, so eaten away by hunger and worms that, out of pity, they carried the beast off into their own novels.
