The Adventures of a Suburbanite

by Ellis Parker Butler

We had plenty of time in which to select our horse while our stable was building. My advertisement in the local paper brought a horse to my door the morning after it appeared, and no horse could have suited me quite so well as that one, but I was resolute and firm. I told the man—he was not a dealer nor yet a commuter, and my conversation with him showed me that he knew just enough, and not too much, about horses—that I liked his horse very well indeed, but that I could not purchase it.. At this he seemed downcast, and I did not blame him. He seemed to take my refusal as some sort of personal insult, for the horse was young, large, strong, gentle, and speedy, and the price was right; but every time I began to weaken Isobel said, “John, remember number eleven!” and I refrained from purchasing that horse. I finally sent the man away with warm expressions of my esteem for him as a man, but that did not seem to cheer him much.

An hour later another man brought another horse, and I sent him away also, as was my duty, for he was only number two; but he was hardly gone when horse number one appeared again. I saw at once that I was going to have trouble with that man. He was so sure he had the horse I wanted that he would not go away and stay away. He kept coming back, and each time he went away sadder than before. He was a sad-looking man, anyway, and he would sit in his buggy and talk to me until another horse was driven up, and then he would sigh and drive down to the corner, and sit and look at me reproachfully until the other man drove away again. Then he would drive back and reproach me, with tears in his eyes, for not buying his horse. By lunch time I was almost worn out, and I told Isobel as much when I looked out of the window and saw that handsome horse and his sad driver waiting patiently at my gate. I told her I was tempted to take that horse, Mrs. Rolfs or no Mrs. Rolfs.

“Take that horse?” said Isobel, as if my words surprised her. “Why, of course we are going to take that horse!”

“But, my dear,” I said, “after what you told me about taking the eleventh horse?”

“Certainly,” said Isobel. “What is this but the eleventh horse? It came first, and then another horse came, and then this one came third, and then some other horse came, and then this one came fifth, and so on, and now it is standing there at the gate, the eleventh horse. Certainly we will buy this horse.”

“Isobel,” I said, “we might quite as well have bought it the first time it was driven to our gate as this time.”

“Not at all,” she said; “that would have been an altogether different thing. If we had taken the first horse that was offered we would have regretted it all our lives; but now we can take this horse and feel perfectly safe.”

Bob—that was the name of the horse—fitted into our stable pretty well. He had to bend rather sharply in the middle to get out of his stall, but he was quite limber for a horse of his age and size, so he managed it very well. A stiffer horse might have broken in two or have been permanently bent. The stall was so economically built that a large, long horse like Bob stuck out of it like a long ship in a short dock; he stuck out so far that we had to go around through the carriage room to get on the other side of him. Our new Mr. Prawley did not mind this. He was willing to spend all the time necessary going from one bit of work to another.