William Dean Howells

“ An impenetrable mystery hung about the owner, through which he sometimes dimly loomed as a gentleman in failing health, who had to give up his daily drives, and had no use for the horse. There were cases in which the dealer came secretly, from pure zeal, to show a horse whose owner supposed him still in the stable, and who must be taken back before his absence was noticed. If my friend insisted upon knowing the owner and conferring with him, in any of these instances, it was darkly admitted that he was a gentleman in the livery business over in Somerville or down in the Lower Port. ”

“ My friend owned that a wheelbarrow was of an alarming presence, but he had his reserves respecting the self-control and intelligence of this pony-horse. The dealer amiably withdrew him, and said that he would bring next day a horse—if he could get the owner to part with a family pet—that would suit; but upon investigation it appeared that this treasure was what is called a calico-horse, and my friend, who was without the ambition to figure in the popular eye as a stray circus-rider, declined to see him. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But Frank, though no thoroughbred, eclipsed these patricians when he came. He had a little head, and a neck gallantly arched; he was black and plump and smooth, and though he carried himself with a petted air, and was a dandy to the tips of his hooves, his knowing eye was kindly. He turned it upon my friend with the effect of understanding his case at a glance. ”

“ Probably if he could have waited they might have replaced Billy in time, but their next installment from the West produced nothing suited to his wants but a horse with the presence and carriage of a pig, and he preferred to let them sell Billy for what he would bring, and to trust his fate elsewhere. Billy had fallen nearly one half in value, and he brought very little—to his owner; though the new purchaser was afterwards reported to value him at much more than what my friend had paid for him. These things are really mysteries; you cannot fathom them; it is idle to try. ”

“ In a terrible cyclone the equipage swept round the neighbor's house, vanished, reappeared, swooped down his lawn, and vanished again. It was incredible.
My friend stood transfixed among his melons. He knew that his neighbor's children played under the porte-cochère on the other side of the house which Billy had just surrounded in his flight, and probably.... My friend's first impulse was not to go and see, but to walk into his own house, and ignore the whole affair. But you cannot really ignore an affair of that kind. You must face it, and commonly it stares you out of countenance. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This was the figure my friend had thought of; he drew a breath of relief. "Where did you buy your horse?"
"Oh, I always get my horses"—the plural abashed my friend—"at the Chevaliers'. If you throw yourself on their mercy, they'll treat you well. I'll send you a note to them."
"Do!" cried my friend, as the professor sprang upon his horse, and galloped away.
My friend walked home encouraged; his purpose of buying a horse had not seemed so monstrous, at least to this hardened offender. ”

“ The professor to whom he first intimated his purpose flung himself from his horse's back to the grassy border of the sidewalk where my friend stood, and said he would give him a few points. "In the first place don't buy a horse that shows much daylight under him, unless you buy a horse-doctor with him; get a short-legged horse; and he ought to be short and thick in the barrel,"—or words to that effect. "Don't get a horse with a narrow forehead: there are horse-fools as well as the other kind, and you want a horse with room for brains. ”

“ If one has money enough, there seems no reason why one should not go and buy such a horse as he wants. This is the commonly accepted theory, on which the whole commerce in horses is founded, and on which my friend proceeded.
He was about removing from Charlesbridge, where he had lived many happy years without a horse, farther into the country, where there were charming drives and inconvenient distances, and where a horse would be very desirable, if not quite necessary. ”

“ If my friend found that the horse behind was likely to pass Frank, he made a merit of holding him in. If they met a team, he lay back in his phaeton, and affected not to care to be going faster than a walk, any way.
One of the things for which he chiefly prized Frank was his skill in backing and turning. He is one of those men who become greatly perturbed when required to back and turn a vehicle ”

“ After a while he added, "If you can get this mare for a hundred and twenty-five, you'd better buy her."
"Well, I will," said my friend. He would have bought her, in fact, if she had clicked like a noiseless sewing-machine. But the owner, remote as Medford, and invisibly dealing, as usual, through a third person, would not sell her for one and a quarter; he wanted one and a half. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Billy's former owners made a feint of supplying other horses in his place, but the only horse supplied was an aged veteran with the scratches, who must have come seven early in our era, and who, from his habit of getting about on tiptoe, must have been tender for'a'd beyond anything of my friend's previous experience. ”

“ 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 ”

“ During this interval he removed from Charlesbridge to the country, and found himself, to his self-scorn and self-pity, actually reduced to hiring a livery horse by the day. But relief was at hand. The carpenter who had remained to finish up the new house after my friend had gone into it bethought himself of a firm in his place who brought on horses from the West, and had the practice of selling a horse on trial, and constantly replacing it with other horses till the purchaser was suited. ”

“ 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. ”