the
world. Well, old fellow, what do you think of my horse stable? Pretty
fair, isn't it?" And Mr. Wood went on talking to me as he fed and
groomed his horses, till I soon found out that his chief pride was in
them.

I like to have human beings talk to me. Mr. Morris often reads his
sermons to me, and Miss Laura tells me secrets that I don't think she
would tell to any one else.

I watched Mr. Wood carefully, while he groomed a huge, gray cart-horse,
that he called Dutchman. He took a brush in his right hand, and a
curry-comb in his left, and he curried and brushed every part of the
horse's skin, and afterward wiped him with a cloth. "A good grooming is
equal to two quarts of oats, Joe," he said to me.

Then he stooped down and examined the horse's hoofs. "Your shoes are too
heavy, Dutchman," he said; "but that pig-headed blacksmith thinks he
knows more about horses than I do. 'Don't cut the sole nor the frog,' I
say to him. 'Don't pare the hoof so much, and don't rasp it; and fit
your shoe to the foot, and not the foot to the shoe,' and he looks as if
he wanted to say, 'Mind your own business.' We'll not go to him again.
''Tis hard to teach an old dog new tricks.' I got you to work for me,
not to wear out your strength in lifting about his weighty shoes."

Mr. Wood stopped talking for a few minutes, and whistled a tune. Then he
began again. "I've made a study of horses, Joe. Over forty years I've
studied them, and it's my opinion that the average horse knows more than
the average man that drives him. When I think of the stupid fools that
are goading patient horses about, beating them and misunderstanding
them, and thinking they are only clods of earth with a little life in
them, I'd like to take their horses out of the shafts and harness them
in, and I'd trot them off at a pace, and slash them, and jerk them, till
I guess they'd come out with a little less patience than the animal
does.

"Look at this Dutchman--see the size of him. You'd think he hadn't any
more nerves than a bit of granite. Yet he's got a skin as sensitive as a
girl's. See how he quivers if I run the curry-comb too harshly over him.
The idiot I got him from didn't know what was the matter with him. He'd
bought him for a reliable horse, and there he was, kicking and stamping
whenever the boy went near him. 'Your boy's got too heavy a hand, Deacon
Jones,' said I, when he described the horse's actions to me. 'You may
depend upon it, a four-legged