The four-year-old stallion Emerald, a big silver-grey racehorse of American build, woke up in his stall about midnight as usual. To the right and left of him, and across the passage, the other horses were chewing hay to a rhythm, lustily crunching it and snorting occasionally as the dust tickled their nostrils. The groom on duty was snoring on a heap of straw in a corner. Emerald knew, by the alternation of the days and the sound of that snoring, that it was Vasily, a young chap whom the horses disliked because he smoked reeking tobacco in the stable, often came into the stalls drunk, jabbed the horses in the belly with his knee, shook his fist over their eyes, jerked the halter roughly, and always shouted threateningly at them in an unnatural, wheezy boom.

Emerald walked up to the stall door. Standing in her stall just opposite his own was Smart, a young black mare that was not yet fully grown. Emerald could not see her body in the darkness, but when she pulled away from the fodder, and turned hack her head, her big eye would shine for a few seconds with a fine violet glow. Distending his delicate nostrils, Emerald took a long breath, sensed the hardly perceptible but exciting smell of her skin, and gave a short neigh. She turned swiftly and responded with a tremulous, affectionately skittish whinny.