"t'other and which"
with them for a while. "I wouldn't have done it," said his neighbor,
Squire Greffern: "I wouldn't have fought the man. I'd have reasoned with
him kindly. I'd have said, 'See here, now, this horse isn't to blame: he
ain't human,' says I, 'and you ought not to abuse him,' says I. And says
I, 'You ought to know better than to hurt a horse: it injures him,' says
I. 'He has more sense than you have' (getting excited). 'You deserve to
be licked yourself, by hoky! Why, Gosh Almighty! get out, or I'll thrash
the daylights out of your darned rotten hide!'" So ended the squire's
reproof.

The old hill-farmer has an old dog grown from indulgence, like his
horses, in the habit of going his own gait. He _will_ trot to church on
Sundays, and trot, trot, down the aisle after meeting has begun, or, if
he likes, up into the gallery. When two of these obstinate old dogs once
met before the pulpit they indulged in a whirlwind of fight. The
minister requested the sexton to put them out, but they showed him their
teeth and fought until satisfied. Then the minister administered a grave
rebuke to the farmers for desecrating the house of God by bringing dogs
to church. Whether the dogs understood it or not, one of them never went
to church again.

Another luxury of the hill-farmer is unabridged hospitality. He would
agree with Doctor Johnson that nothing promotes happiness so much as
conversation. Blazing fires--beacons of company--often flame up his
best rooms' chimney-stacks, pouring their blue wood-smoke high in the
clear air of the hills. Thanksgiving Day in the hills would do for a
festival in honor of Jupiter, the patron of friendship, 'tis a day of
such hospitality. It is the only day of the year when the boy has enough
to eat. Not that there is not plenty all the year round. It is always
_jam_ and never _satis_ with the boy, to borrow Tom Hood's joke. In
killing-time they put down hecatombs of beef in snow and of ham and
sausage in hot lard, and they have stores of cod-fish to be cooked with
cream, and of chickens for potpies, which are never made properly, for
some mysterious reason, save by a farmer's wife. A fearful fate, though,
has been known to befall a farmhouse among the wintry hills when the
farmer's wife has put too much sage in the sausage. Too much sage all
winter, ah! Nothing short of being "clyed," as the farmer's wife
pronounces it, will satisfy a boy who works on the hills; and that he is
on Thank