28 NORTH CAROLINA 



courage, I said, " Why not take advice at 

 the next house we come to ? Two heads are 

 better than one." That was a word in sea- 

 son. To take advice would be a kind of 

 division of responsibility. It is what doc- 

 tors do when the patient is dying on their 

 hands. The man brightened at once. 



A mile or two more of halting and painful 

 progress, then, and we approached a clear- 

 ing, on the farther side of which two men 

 were busy with a plough. The driver hailed 

 one of them by name, and made known our 

 difficulty. Would n't he please come to the 

 road and see if he could make out what was 

 the matter ? He responded in the most 

 neighborly spirit (he would have been a 

 queer farmer, neighborly or not, not to feel 

 interested in a question about a horse) ; but 

 after looking into the animal's mouth, and 

 disclaiming any special right to speak in 

 such a case, he could only say that he saw 

 no sign of anything worse than fatigue. 

 Hadn't the horse been worked hard lately? 

 Yes, the driver answered, he had been in the 

 harness pretty steadily for some time past. 

 At this I put in my oar. Could n't another 

 horse be borrowed somewhere, and the tired 



