Adopting an Abandoned Farm | Page 8

of news for the press" as he went his daily rounds. "But this," I exclaimed, "is just what I don't want and can't allow. Now if you should drive in here some day and discover me dead, reclining against yonder noble elm, or stark at its base, surrounded by my various pets, don't allude to it in the most indirect way. I prefer the funeral to be strictly private. Moreover, if I notice another 'item' about me, I'll buy of your rival." And the trouble ceased.
But the horses! Still they came and went. I used to pay my friend the rubicund surgeon to test some of these highly recommended animals in a short drive with me.
One pronounced absolutely unrivaled was discovered by my wise mentor to be "watch-eyed," "rat-tailed," with a swollen gland on the neck, would shy at a stone, stand on hind legs for a train, with various other minor defects. I grew fainthearted, discouraged, cynical, bitter. Was there no horse for me? I became town-talk as "a drefful fussy old maid who didn't know her own mind, and couldn't be suited no way."
I remember one horse brought by a butcher from West Bungtown. It was, in the vernacular, a buck-skin. Hide-bound, with ribs so prominent they suggested a wash-board. The two fore legs were well bent out at the knees; both hind legs were swelled near the hoofs. His ears nearly as large as a donkey's; one eye covered with a cataract, the other deeply sunken. A Roman nose, accentuated by a wide stripe, aided the pensive expression of his drooping under lip. He leaned against the shafts as if he were tired.
"There, Marm," said the owner, eying my face as an amused expression stole over it; "ef you don't care for style, ef ye want a good, steddy critter, and a critter that can go, and a critter that any lady can drive, there's the critter for ye!"
I did buy at last, for life had become a burden. An interested neighbor (who really pitied me?) induced me to buy a pretty little black horse. I named him "O.K."
After a week I changed to "N.G."
After he had run away, and no one would buy him, "D.B."
At last I succeeded in exchanging this shying and dangerous creature for a melancholy, overworked mare at a livery stable. I hear that "D.B." has since killed two I-talians by throwing them out when not sufficiently inebriated to fall against rocks with safety.
And my latest venture is a backer.
Horses have just as many disagreeable traits, just as much individuality in their badness, as human beings. Under kind treatment, daily petting, and generous feeding, "Dolly" is too frisky and headstrong for a lady to drive.
"Sell that treacherous beast at once or you will be killed," writes an anxious friend who had a slight acquaintance with her moods.
I want now to find an equine reliance whose motto is "Nulla vestigia retrorsum," or "No steps backward."
I have pasted Mr. Hale's famous motto, "Look forward and not back," over her stall--but with no effect. The "Lend a Hand" applies to those we yell for when the backing is going on.
By the way, a witty woman said the other day that men always had the advantage. A woman looked back and was turned into a pillar of salt; Bellamy looked back and made sixty thousand dollars.
Mr. Robert B. Roosevelt, in his amusing book "Five Acres too Much" gives even a more tragic picture, saying: "My experience of horseflesh has been various and instructive. I have been thrown over their heads and slid over their tails; have been dragged by saddle, stirrups, and tossed out of wagons. I have had them to back and to kick, to run and to bolt, to stand on their hind feet and kick with their front, and then reciprocate by standing on their front and kicking with their hind feet.... I have been thrown much with horses and more by them."
"Horses are the most miserable creatures, invariably doing precisely what they ought not to do; a pest, a nuisance, a bore." Or, as some one else puts it:
"A horse at its best is an amiable idiot; at its worst, a dangerous maniac."
CHAPTER IV.
FOR THOSE WHO LOVE PETS.
"All were loved and all were regretted, but life is made up of forgetting."
"The best thing which a man possesses is his dog."
When I saw a man driving into my yard after this, I would dart out of a back door and flee to sweet communion with my cows.
On one such occasion I shouted back that I did not want a horse of any variety, could not engage any fruit trees, did not want the place photographed, and was just going out to spend the day. I was courteously but firmly informed that my latest visitor