JENNY FLUCTUATES. 9 



will have them, and so it will go on to the end of time. 



Nell was, however, fated to fall from the pedestal 

 erected by her owner as there was a rival in the stable. It 

 was Jenny. She was a four-year-old, a beautiful brown, 

 and one-eyed. The skill acquired in handling Nell 

 caused Jenny to put her right foot forward and step off 

 with that coveted one, two, three, four beat of the regu- 

 lation trotter. Over thirty years after, Fasig's eyes 

 would sparkle as he told how Jenny could go by Nell 

 "the same as a streak of lightning would pass a funeral 

 procession." In one of his letters to the Horse Review 

 he said : "I played Jenny for a 'quarter hoss,' and she 

 could run, until one day I found she could trot. Gee 

 whiz ! how she could step. I wish I had her now, in the 

 days of bike sulkies, and silk velvet tracks. She had a 

 gait like Dexter's, that opened and shut like a steel trap, 

 game and gritty, and wild ; you bet she was ; but she 

 always stuck to a trot. One day father and I went into 

 the country. Jenny was hitched to a spring seat, one- 

 horse wagon, and on our return trip we struck a drove of 

 hogs. Jenny and hogs hardly danced in the same set, and 

 I didn't have a howling hankering to tackle that drove, 

 neither did I dare show dad the white feather. We 

 started cautiously and had got quarter way through the 

 drove, when an idiot pig got under the hind wheel and 

 protested. Jenny 'fluctuated' just once; father went 

 over backwards, and I hung to the lines tight as polish on 

 a tombstone. There was activity in the pork market, and 

 it is conceded in that locality that the next four miles were 

 negotiated in record-breaking time. Nobody was hurt. 



Jenny remained the property of William B. Fasig 

 until he ran away from school, a few days before he 

 was sixteen, to join James Garfield's Forty-second Regi- 



