Ir a man could go into open market and for two or three hundred dollars purchase the lifelong devotion of a friend, though a humble friend, it would be accounted a wonderful thing. But that is exactly what happens, or might happen, whenever a horse is bought. You give him food, lodging, and the reasonable services of a valet, in return for which he will not only further your business or your pleasure, as the case may be, to the best of his ability, but he will also repay you with affection, respond to your caresses, greet you with a neigh of pleased recognition, and in a hundred ways of his own exhibit a sense of the relationship.

There are men to whom a horse is only an animate machine: they will ride and drive him, hire grooms and draw checks for his sustenance and keeping, but all without a single thought of the animal as having a character, a mind, a career of his own; as being susceptible to pain or pleasure; as a creature for whose welfare they have assumed a certain responsibility, of which they cannot get rid, although they may forget it or deny its existence. Even among people who are intelligent, religious, and kindhearted, as the world goes, there is sometimes found, as we all know, especially when their own convenience is concerned, an astonishing indifference to the sufferings of dumb beasts.

Never shall I forget the shock produced upon my infant mind by a case of this sort in which a deeply venerated bishop was the actor. The good man described in my presence the great difficulty that he had recently experienced, upon arriving in town, in obtaining a conveyance from the railroad station to the house where he was to stay, two or three miles distant. Through some mistake no carriage had been sent for him,

and by the liverymen to whom the bishop applied he was told that all their horses were so wearied and jaded, a huge picnic or funeral having just occurred in the village, that they absolutely could not send one out again. But the successor of the Apostles so wrought upon the stable-keepers by his eloquence — thus he narrated, with no suspicion of the awful judgment that was passing upon him by youthful innocence, sitting unnoticed in a corner that some unlucky, overtired brute was finally dragged from his stall and sent off upon the five-mile jaunt. Now the day was warm, to be sure, and the bishop a stout man; still, being in the prime of life, he could have taken no harm, but rather good, from the walk; and yet neither when he hired the horse nor when he related the transaction did it occur to him that the act was one of inexcusable cruelty. How many people, indeed, know or care what is the condition of the livery horses that they hire from time to time? How many, when they summon a cab, so much as glance at the beast in the shafts? But it is almost always possible to make a selection, rejecting the palpably unfit, choosing the fit horse; and if everybody took even this slight amount of trouble, the employment of broken-down cab horses would cease to be profitable.

There is a good deal of hard-heartedness in our Puritan blood as respects dumb animals. I once spent several weeks on a farm where many beasts of various kinds were kept. The family

was of pure New England stock, farmers for many generations back, stalwart, intelligent, honest people, pillars of the church, leading men in the village, but in their treatment of dumb beasts without feeling or compunction. If the cows did not enter their stalls at the proper moment, they were pounded

ing for new desks," said Miss Hender with dignity. "You will have to see the supervisor and the selectmen." There did not seem to be any need of his lingering, but she had an ardent desire to be pleasing to a person of such evident distinction. "We always tell folks I thought you might be gratified to know, sir that this is the school-house where the Honorable Joseph K. Laneway first attended school. Some do not know that he was born in this town, and went West very young; it is only about a mile

from here where his folks used to live."

At this moment the visitor's eyes fell. He did not look at pretty Marilla any more, but opened Johnny Spencer's arithmetic, and, seeing the imaginary portrait of the great General Laneway, laughed a little, a very deep-down comfortable laugh it was, while Johnny himself turned cold with alarm, he could not have told why.

It was very still in the school-room; the bee was buzzing and bumping at the pane again; the moment was one of intense expectation.

The stranger looked at the children right and left. "The fact is, young people," said he, in a tone that was half pride and half apology, "I am Joseph K. Laneway myself."

He tried to extricate himself from the narrow quarters of the desk, but for an embarrassing moment found that he was stuck fast. Johnny Spencer instinctively gave him an assisting push, and once free the great soldier, statesman, and millionaire took a few steps forward to the open floor; then, after hesitating a moment, he mounted the little platform and stood in the teacher's place. Marilla Hender was as pale as ashes.

"I have thought many times," the great guest began, "that some day I should come back to visit this place, which is so closely interwoven with the memories of my childhood. In my counting-room, on the fields of war, in the halls of Congress, and most of all in my

Western home, my thoughts have flown back to the hills and brooks of Winby and to this little old school-house. I could shut my eyes and call back the buzz of voices, and fear my teacher's frown, and feel my boyish ambitions waking and stirring in my breast. On that bench where I just sat I saw some notches that I cut with my first jackknife fifty-eight years ago this very spring. I remember the faces of the boys and girls who went to school with me, and I see their grandchildren before me. I know that one is a Goodsoe and another a Winn by the old family look. One generation goes, and another comes.

"There are many things that I might say to you. I meant, even in those early restricted days, to make my name known, and I dare say that you are ambitious

too.

Be careful what you wish for in this world, for if you wish hard enough you are sure to get it. I once heard a very wise man say this, and the longer I live the more firmly I believe it to be true. But wishing hard means working hard for what you want, and the world's prizes wait for the men and women who are ready to take pains to win them. Be careful and set your minds on the best things. I meant to be a rich man when I was a boy here, and I stand before you a rich man, knowing the care and anxiety and responsibility of wealth. I meant to go to Congress, and I am one of the Senators from Kansota. I say this as humbly as I say it proudly. I used to read of the valor and patriotism of the old Greeks and Romans with my youthful blood leaping along my veins, and it came to pass that my own country was in danger, and that I could help to fight her battles. Perhaps some one of these little lads has before him a more eventful life than I have lived, and is looking forward to activity and honor and the pride of fame. I wish him all the joy that I have had, all the toil that I have had, and all the bitter disappointments even; for adversity leads a man to de

seen

that a paddock is appurtenant to the stable. (Not everybody, indeed, is so for tunately situated, but still the conditions just mentioned are by no means uncommon.) Now let us suppose further that you go into the market or to some private person and purchase, as you may easily do, for forty or fifty dollars an old broken-down horse, of whom a long hard day's work in a cab, an express or peddler's wagon, has been, and unless you intervene will for some years yet continue to be extracted. Take him home, and watch the quick transition from misery to happiness. He comes into your stable with stiff, painful steps; his legs swollen from hock and knee to ankle; his ribs clearly visible through a rough, staring coat; and, above all, with that strained, anxious expression of the eye which nobody who has once and understood it can ever expel from his memory. It is the expression of despair. You take off his shoes, give him a run at grass or a deep bed of straw in a comfortable loose box, and forthwith the old horse begins to improve. Little by little, the expression of his eye changes, the swelling goes out of his legs, and it will not be long before he cuts a caper; a stiff and ungainly one, to be sure, but still a caper, indicative of health and happiness. He will neigh at your approach, and gladly submit his head for a caress, whereas at first he would have shrunk in terror from any such advances. (It may be ten years since a hand was laid upon him in kindness.) If you have any work for him to do, the old horse will perform it with alacrity, exerting himself out of gratitude; he will even flourish off in harness with the airs of a colt, as who should say, "There is life in me yet; don't send me to the knacker; behold my strength and agility." Treat him as you would if he had cost you a great sum, or as if you expected to win a great sum through his exertions. Let him have good blankets, good groom

ing, and all the little attentions of a wellordered establishment. Is there anything ridiculous in this? Shall not the stable, as well as the house, have its sacred rites of hospitality? Shall not the old cheap horse be made as comfortable as the young and costly one ?

And here I anticipate an obvious criticism. "The horse should be killed, and the money that it costs to maintain him be given to the poor." I grant it. Let the old horse be shot, and let the two dollars and fifty cents per week necessary for his support be given in charity. But see to it, ye who might maintain an equine pensioner, and forbear to do so for reasons of conscience, see to it that the poor be not defrauded of the sum which would thus have been saved for them.

Doubtless the ideal manner of keeping a horse is that practiced in Arabia, where, we are told, he is treated like one of the family, being the constant companion of the children, and allowed to poke his nose within the tent and into all the household affairs. Unfortunately, our habits of living will not permit such intimacy, although I have seen a yearling colt within the walls of a country dwelling-house, taking a moderate lunch of oats from the kitchen table, and afterward, with ears erect, briefly surveying the outside world through the drawing-room window. Mr. Briggs's introduction of his hunter to the diningroom on Christmas night, in the animal's professional capacity, and the consequent results to the china, will occur to the reader as a similar case. But although such instances must necessarily be rare, and are not, perhaps, exactly to be imitated, it is possible for every horseowner to cultivate the social and affectionate side of the animal's nature by talking to and caressing him, by visiting him in the stable, by making him little gifts, from time to time, of sugar and other dainties. Petting like this undoubtedly tends to make high-spirited

der, in her most contained and official

manner.

The grammar class sighed like a single pupil, and obeyed. She was very stern with the grammar class, but every one in school had an inner sense that it was a great day in the history of District Number Four.

II.

The Honorable Mr. Laneway found the outdoor air very fresh and sweet after the closeness of the school-house. It had just that same odor in his boyhood, and as he escaped he had a delightful sense of playing truant or of having an unexpected holiday. It was easier to think of himself as a boy, and to slip back into boyish thoughts, than to bear the familiar burden of his manhood. He climbed the tumble - down stone wall across the road, and went along a narrow path to the spring that bubbled up clear and cold under a great red oak. How many times he had longed for a drink of that water, and now here it was, and the thirst of that warm spring day was hard to quench! Again and again he stooped to fill the birch bark dipper which the school-children had made, just as his own comrades made theirs years before. The oak-tree was dying at the top. The pine woods beyond had been cut and had grown again since his boyhood, and looked much as he remembered them. Beyond the spring and away from the woods the path led across overgrown pastures to another road, perhaps three quarters of a mile away, and near this road was the small farm which had been his former home. As he walked slowly along, he was met again and again by some reminder of his youthful days. He had always liked to refer to his early life in New England in his political addresses, and had spoken more than once of going to find the cows at nightfall in the autumn even

ings, and being glad to warm his bare feet in the places where the sleepy beasts had lain, before he followed their slow steps homeward through bush and brier. The Honorable Mr. Laneway had a touch of true sentiment which added much to his really stirring and effective campaign speeches. He had often been called the "king of the platform” in his adopted State. He had long ago grown used to saying "Go" to one man, and "Come" to another, like the ruler of old; but all his natural power of leadership and habit of authority disappeared at once as he trod the pasture slopes, calling back the remembrance of his childhood. Here was the place where two lads, older than himself, had killed a terrible woodchuck at bay in the angle of a great rock; and just beyond was the sunny spot where he had picked a bunch of pink and white anemones under a prickly barberry thicket, to give to Abby Harran in morning school. She had put them into her desk, and let them wilt there, but she was pleased when she took them. Abby Harran, the little teacher's grandmother, was a year older than he, and had wakened the earliest thought of love in his youthful breast.

It was almost time to catch the first sight of his birthplace. From the knoll just ahead he had often seen the light of his mother's lamp, as he came home from school on winter afternoons; but when he reached the knoll the old house was gone, and so was the great walnuttree that grew beside it, and a pang of disappointment shot through this devout pilgrim's heart. He never had doubted that the old farm was somebody's home still, and had counted upon the pleasure of spending a night there, and sleeping again in that room under the roof, where the rain sounded loud, and the walnut branches brushed to and fro when the wind blew, as if they were the claws of tigers. He hurried across the worn-out fields, long ago turned into sheep pastures,

where the last year's tall grass and goldenrod stood gray and winter-killed; tracing the old walls and fences, and astonished to see how small the fields had been. The prosperous owner of Western farming lands could not help remembering those widespread luxuriant acres, the broad outlooks of his Western home. It was difficult at first to find exactly where the house had stood; even the foundations had disappeared. At last, in the long, faded grass he discovered the doorstep, and near by was a little mound where the great walnut-tree stump had been. The cellar was a mere dent in the sloping ground; it had been filled in by the growing grass and slow processes of summer and winter weather. But just at the pilgrim's right were some thorny twigs of an old rosebush. A sudden brightening of memory brought to mind the love that his mother-dead since his fifteenth year had kept for this sweetbrier. How often she had wished that she had brought it to her new home! So much had changed in the world, so many had gone into the world of light, and here the faithful blooming thing was alive still! There was one slender branch where green buds were starting, and getting ready to flower in the new year.

The afternoon wore late, and still the gray-haired man lingered. He might have laughed at some one else who gave himself up to his thoughts, and found fault with himself, with no defendant to plead his cause at the bar of conscience. It was an altogether lonely hour. He had dreamed all his life, in a sentimental, self-satisfied fashion, of this return to Winby. It had always appeared to be a grand affair, but so far he was himself the only interested spectator at his poor occasion. There was even a dismal consciousness that he had been undignified, perhaps even a little consequential and silly, in the old school-house. The picture of himself on the war-path, in Johnny Spencer's arithmetic, was the

only tribute that this longed - for day had held, but he laughed aloud delightedly at the remembrance. He liked that solemn little boy who sat at his own old desk. There was another older lad, who sat at the back of the room, who reminded Mr. Laneway of himself in his eager youth. There was a spark of light in that fellow's eyes. Once or twice in the earlier afternoon, as he drove along, he had asked people in the road if there were a Laneway family in that neighborhood, but everybody had said no in indifferent fashion. Somehow he had been expecting that every one would know him and greet him, and give him credit for what he had tried to do; but old Winby had her own affairs to look after, and did very well without any of his help.

Joseph Laneway acknowledged to himself at this point that he was weak and unmanly. There must be some old friends who would remember him, and give him as hearty a welcome as the greeting he had brought for them. So he rose and went his way westward toward the sunset. The air was growing damp and cold, and it was time to make sure of shelter. This was hardly like the visit he had meant to pay to his birthplace. He wished with all his heart that he had never come back. But he walked briskly away, intent upon wider thoughts as the fresh evening breeze quickened his steps. He did not consider where he was going, but was for a time the busy man of affairs, stimulated by the unconscious influence of his surroundings. The slender gray birches and pitch pines of that neglected pasture had never before seen a hat and coat exactly in the fashion. They may have been abashed by the presence of a United States Senator and Western millionaire, though a piece of New England ground that had often felt the tread of his bare feet was not likely to quake because a pair of fine shoes stepped hastily along the school-house path.