sted</i>
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>I</i>-talians by throwing them out when not sufficiently
inebriated to fall against rocks with safety.

And my latest venture is a <i>backer</i>.

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 wit