400 AGRICULTURE AND THE HORSE. 



disastrous. You cannot easily kill a colt by injudicious 

 feeding, I know; but you can inflict injuries upon him 

 that are worse than death, and give him a prolonged 

 life of weakness and suffering and uselessness. A 

 dyspeptic man in the counting-room, or the pulpit, or 

 the court-room, — made a dyspeptic by the injudicious 

 food of his childhood, or by his own mature thought- 

 lessness, — is an object of deep compassion, it is true ; 

 but how much more compassion should we feel for the 

 animal, who, without human aspiration and ambition to 

 bear him above the pains of his existence, has been fed 

 into a weakened stomach, and an exaggerated carcass, 

 and nerveless limbs, and tender feet, and unsound 

 joints, and cribbing, and torpor, and premature death ! 

 And this we see continually among the favorite colts. 

 Give me the boys whose health and strength are 

 derived from natural food in infancy, and simple food 

 in youth. Give me the colts whose dams have been 

 generous, and whose owners have been judicious. If 

 I have a colt born late in the season, say in August or 

 September (which I much prefer to spring and early 

 summer), I have no trouble about the first winter. A 

 box-stall, and good food for the marc, who is to nurse 

 her colt until the following spring approaches, will take 

 me over that first trying season, and will prepare the 

 colt well for weaning and his first summer's run at grass. 

 But if my colt is to be weaned, as usual, when he 

 comes to the barn in autumn, I must then exercise skill 

 and judgment in transferring him from his infant life to 



