By the way, a witty woman said the other day that men always had the advantage. A woman looked back and was turned into a pillar of salt; Bellamy looked back and made sixty thousand dollars.
Mr. Robert B. Roosevelt, in his amusing book “Five Acres too Much” gives even a more tragic picture, saying: “My experience of horseflesh has been various and instructive. I have been thrown over their heads and slid over their tails; have been dragged by saddle, stirrups, and tossed out of wagons. I have had them to back and to kick, to run and to bolt, to stand on their hind feet and kick with their front, and then reciprocate by standing on their front and kicking with their hind feet.... I have been thrown much with horses and more by them.”
“Horses are the most miserable creatures, invariably doing precisely what they ought not to do; a pest, a nuisance, a bore.” Or, as some one else puts it:
“A horse at its best is an amiable idiot; at its worst, a dangerous maniac.”
CHAPTER IV.
FOR THOSE WHO LOVE PETS.
“All were loved and all were regretted, but life is made up of forgetting.”
“The best thing which a man possesses is his dog.”
When I saw a man driving into my yard after this, I would dart out of a back door and flee to sweet communion with my cows.
On one such occasion I shouted back that I did not want a horse of any variety, could not engage any fruit trees, did not want the place photographed, and was just going out to spend the day. I was courteously but firmly informed that my latest visitor had, singular to relate, no horse to dispose of, but he “would like fourteen dollars for my dog tax for the current year!” As he was also sheriff, constable, and justice of the peace, I did not think it worth while to argue the question, although I had no more thought of being called up to pay a dog tax than a hen tax or cat tax. I trembled, lest I should be obliged to enumerate my entire menagerie—cats, dogs, canaries, rabbits, pigs, ducks, geese, hens, turkeys, pigeons, peacocks, cows, and horses.