Buying a Horse | Page 7

them; it is idle to try. My friend
remained grieving over his own folly and carelessness, with a fond
hankering for the poor little horse he had lost, and the belief that he
should never find such another. Yet he was not without a
philanthropist's consolation. He had added to the stock of harmless
pleasures in a degree of which he could not have dreamed. All his
acquaintance knew that he had bought a horse, and they all seemed now
to conspire in asking him how he got on with it. He was forced to
confess the truth. On hearing it, his friends burst into shouts of laughter,
and smote their persons, and stayed themselves against lamp-posts and
house-walls. They begged his pardon, and then they began again, and
shouted and roared anew. Since the gale which blew down the poet

----'s chimneys and put him to the expense of rebuilding them, no joke
so generally satisfactory had been offered to the community. My friend
had, in his time, achieved the reputation of a wit by going about and
and saying, "Did you know ----'s chimneys had blown down?" and he
had now himself the pleasure of causing the like quality of wit in
others.
Having abandoned the hope of getting anything out of the people who
had sold him Billy, he was for a time the prey of an inert despair, in
which he had not even spirit to repine at the disorder of a universe in
which he could not find a horse. No horses were now offered to him,
for it had become known throughout the trade that he had bought a
horse. He had therefore to set about counteracting this impression with
what feeble powers were left him. Of the facts of that period he
remembers with confusion and remorse the trouble to which he put the
owner of the pony-horse Pansy, whom he visited repeatedly in a
neighboring town, at a loss of time and money to himself, and with no
result but to embarrass Pansy's owner in his relations with people who
had hired him and did not wish him sold. Something of the old baffling
mystery hung over Pansy's whereabouts; he was with difficulty
produced, and when en evidence he was not the Pansy my friend had
expected. He paltered with his regrets; he covered his disappointment
with what pretenses he could; and he waited till he could telegraph
back his adverse decision. His conclusion was that, next to proposing
marriage, there was no transaction of life that involved so many
delicate and complex relations as buying a horse, and that the rupture of
a horse-trade was little less embarrassing and distressing to all
concerned than a broken engagement. There was a terrible intimacy in
the affair; it was alarmingly personal. He went about sorrowing for the
pain and disappointment he had inflicted on many amiable people of all
degrees who had tried to supply him with a horse.
"Look here," said his neighbor, finding him in this low state, "why
don't you get a horse of the gentleman who furnishes mine?" This had
been suggested before, and my friend explained that he had disliked to
make trouble. His scruples were lightly set aside, and he suffered
himself to be entreated. The fact was he was so discouraged with his

attempt to buy a horse that if any one had now given him such a horse
as he wanted he would have taken it.
One sunny, breezy morning his neighbor drove my friend over to the
beautiful farm of the good genius on whose kindly offices he had now
fixed his languid hopes. I need not say what the landscape was in
mid-August, or how, as they drew near the farm, the air was enriched
with the breath of vast orchards of early apples,--apples that no forced
fingers rude shatter from their stems, but that ripen and mellow
untouched, till they drop into the straw with which the orchard aisles
are bedded; it is the poetry of horticulture; it is Art practicing the wise
and gracious patience of Nature, and offering to the Market a Summer
Sweeting of the Hesperides.
The possessor of this luscious realm at once took my friend's case into
consideration; he listened, the owner of a hundred horses, with gentle
indulgence to the shapeless desires of a man whose wildest dream was
one horse. At the end he said, "I see you want a horse that can take care
of himself."
"No," replied my friend, with the inspiration of despair. "I want a horse
that can take care of me."
The good genius laughed, and turned the conversation. Neither he nor
my friend's neighbor was a man of many words, and like taciturn
people they talked in low tones. The three