FOR SALE— A THOROUGHBRED NAG. 109 



At lunch says father to me, ' I don't see, James, what's to 

 hinder you from training that mare.' 



' No more do I, father,' I answered, after a moment of sur- 

 prise. ' I don't see why she shouldn't be managed. I'll sit her 

 if she don't lie down and roll with me ; and if she does, I can 

 stand over her till she gets up again.' 



My father looked at me steadily, and demanded, 



' Who said she laid down and rolled ?' 



I looked foolish, and replied that I had heard no one say 

 that — only — 



' Only,' repeated my father, waxing warm, getting as nearly 

 angry as I ever saw him get, ' that's how a poor brute's character, 

 like many a man's, is whispered and wunked and nodded and 

 hummed and hawed away, before — Take and try her.' 



I was overwhelmed with the unusual volume and warmth of 

 my father's speech. I felt hurt, too ; but I promised to do my 

 best and gentlest with the mare. But here my mother inter- 

 posed. The whispers defamatory of the mare that had got 

 abroad had crept insidiously into her busy household cars, and 

 she now, in some anxiety for the life and limb of her first-born, 

 hinted that it might be better to let an experienced horse-breaker 

 have her first. 



**That's just the fault I have to find with these men, my dear,' 

 said my father, ' that they are Y^oxs^-breakers. If an animal shows 

 any will or spirit of its own, they have no thought of trying to 

 bend it — they must break it. If they can't, the horse is a vixen 

 — full of vice — they can do nothing with her. She passes from 

 their hands — or rather from their fists and whips and feet, and 

 the sound of their coarse voices — with a mortal dread upon her 

 of any human being, so that it will be difficult, very difficult, for 

 any one to do anything with her, except' — and he gave me a 

 straight kind look (as a peace-offering, I suppose, for the sin of 

 his warm words) — ' with the most patient and thoughtful treat- 

 ment, which I hope — I think James will give her.' 



Such words from my father, who seldom spoke either in 

 praise or blame, sounded to me the rarest flattery. I blushed, 

 and resolved to do my best. 



However, I found that in private my mother had prevailed 

 upon my father to let the mare remain unhandled till the harvest 

 was past, by which time, perhaps, her high fierce spirit (if she had 

 it) might have sunk to a very tame ebb on an exclusive grass 

 diet. 



