Buying a Horse | Page 3

was not going on seven years old, but was coming
seven. There are curious facts, by the way, in regard to the age of
horses which are not generally known. A horse is never of an even age:
that is, he is not six, or eight, or ten, but five, or seven, or nine years old;
he is sometimes, but not often, eleven; he is never thirteen; his favorite
time of life is seven, and he rarely gets beyond it, if on sale. My friend
found the number of horses brought into the world in 1871 quite
beyond computation.
He also found that most hard-working horses were sick or ailing, as
most hard-working men and women are; that perfectly sound horses are
as rare as perfectly sound human beings, and are apt, like the latter, to
be vicious.
He began to have a quick eye for the characteristics of horses, and
could walk round a proffered animal and scan his points with the best.
"What," he would ask, of a given beast, "makes him let his lower lip
hang down in that imbecile manner?"
"Oh, he's got a parrot-mouth. Some folks like 'em." Here the dealer
would pull open the creature's flabby lips, and discover a beak like that
of a polyp; and the cleansing process on the grass or trousers would
take place.
Of another. "What makes him trot in that spread-out, squatty way,
behind?" he demanded, after the usual tour of the block.

"He travels wide. Horse men prefer that."
They preferred any ugliness or awkwardness in a horse to the opposite
grace or charm, and all that my friend could urge, in meek withdrawal
from negotiation, was that he was not of an educated taste. In the
course of long talks, which frequently took the form of warnings, he
became wise in the tricks practiced by all dealers except his interlocutor.
One of these, a device for restoring youth to an animal nearing the
dangerous limit of eleven, struck him as peculiarly ingenious. You
pierce the forehead, and blow into it with a quill; this gives an
agreeable fullness, and erects the drooping ears in a spirited and
mettlesome manner, so that a horse coming eleven will look for a time
as if he were coming five.
After a thorough course of the volunteer dealers, and after haunting the
Chevaliers' stables for several weeks, my friend found that not money
alone was needed to buy a horse. The affair began to wear a sinister
aspect. He had an uneasy fear that in several cases he had refused the
very horse he wanted with the aplomb he had acquired in dismissing
undesirable beasts. The fact was he knew less about horses than when
he began to buy, while he had indefinitely enlarged his idle knowledge
of men, of their fatuity and hollowness. He learned that men whom he
had always envied their brilliant omniscience in regard to horses, as
they drove him out behind their dashing trotters, were quite ignorant
and helpless in the art of buying; they always got somebody else to buy
their horses for them. "Find a man you can trust," they said, "and then
put yourself in his hands. And never trust anybody about the health of a
horse. Take him to a veterinary surgeon, and have him go all over him."
My friend grew sardonic; then he grew melancholy and haggard. There
was something very strange in the fact that a person unattainted of
crime, and not morally disabled in any known way, could not take his
money and buy such a horse as he wanted with it. His acquaintance
began to recommend men to him. "If you want a horse, Captain Jenks
is your man." "Why don't you go to Major Snaffle? He'd take pleasure
in it." But my friend, naturally reluctant to trouble others, and sickened
by long failure, as well as maddened by the absurdity that if you

wanted a horse you must first get a man, neglected this really good
advice. He lost his interest in the business, and dismissed with
lack-lustre indifference the horses which continued to be brought to his
gate. He felt that his position before the community was becoming
notorious and ridiculous. He slept badly; his long endeavor for a horse
ended in nightmares.
One day he said to a gentleman whose turn-out he had long admired, "I
wonder if you couldn't find me a horse!"
"Want a horse?"
"Want a horse! I thought my need was known beyond the sun. I thought
my want of a horse was branded on my forehead."
This gentleman laughed, and then he said, "I've just seen a mare that
would suit you. I thought of buying her, but I want a match, and this
mare is too small. She'll be