I should have shot him long ago. 'Tis hard
to make a good dog suffer for a bad one, but that's the way of 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.
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