36 AGRICULTURE OF MAIXK. 



digestion has been weakened all winter in trying to get nutrition 

 out of innutrition, and then he begins to feed good feeds and to 

 work the horse, with his muscles untrained, his vitality not what 

 it should be, and very soon there comes a knock at my door, and 

 the man says, "My horse is tearing the barn down. I wish ypu 

 would come down there," It is simply because the horse's diges- 

 tion had become debilitated. The cow, with her stronger diges- 

 tion, not infrequently will go through that critical period of 

 giving birth to her calf, and then trouble will begin. She does 

 not seem to have any life. Perhaps she has escaped the other 

 conditions that w^e spoke of, but she hasn't any life. In my boy- 

 hood days this used to be called hollow horn. I do not know 

 whether it is so called now in Maine or not but it is pretty well 

 rooted out in New York. Then there was another disease called 

 the wolf in the tail. And I remember that an old gentleman in 

 miy vicinity, in my youth, used to go about the country looking 

 for cases where the hide had grown fast to the back bone, and 

 usually for a drink of new York cider he would loosen up the 

 hide. All those symptoms, you understand, were simply brought 

 about from nervous, muscular and blood starvation. Of course 

 you should go to work and build up the system, using the condi- 

 tion powders and using perhaps a little nux vomica to tone up 

 the appetite. 



Let us follow the life of the little colt for a while. It makes 

 my heart sad sometimes, when I see the conditions under which 

 he is raised. Look at that little colt when he is getting his milk 

 diej, with a little grass or a few oats to furnish the bread. 

 ^A'^hen he is weaned he looks like a little horse, he has the body 

 of a horse, the conformation of a horse. Wiean him as many a 

 man weans him and carry him through the first winter of his 

 life, and he will look but little like a horse. My mind goes back 

 to my boyhood days when I was given a colt. My father told 

 me to feed him but a very few oats, that he needed a lot of bulky 

 food, something to distend his stomach so as to make him 

 wonderfully strong. That was the common belief in those days, 

 and it is not altogether rooted out from the country yet. I did 

 not always obey my father. The colt had more oats than he told 

 me to give him, and the result was that colt was not just like 

 some of the others. Now how does this little colt, as he has been 

 in years gone by, look the next spring? Has he the body of a 



