"Mis Macallistur: This is fur to say wee is reel obliged to ye fur the Hoss."
"Good gracious, mother! Did you send them a horse?" ejaculated Harry.
"Why, my dear, I wanted to show my sense of their kindness, and I could not offer these people money. I thought a horse would be so useful!"
"Useful! in the Adirondack woods!" And Harry burst into a fit of laughter that scarcely permitted his mother to go on; but at last she proceeded:
"But Scotty and me ain't ackwainted So to speak with Hoss ways; he seems kinder Hum-sick if you may say that of a Cretur. We air etarnally gratified to You for sech a Valewble Pressent, but if you was Wiling we shood Like to swapp it of in spring fur a kow, ourn Being some in years.
"yours to Command, Sary Peck."
But long before Mrs. McAlister's permission to "swap" the horse reached Scott Peck, the creature took his destiny into his own hands. Scott had gone away on a desperate errand, to fetch some sort of food for the poor creature, whose bones stared him in the face, and Sary went out one morning to give him her potato-peelings and some scraps of bread, when, suddenly, he jerked his head fiercely, snapped his halter in two, and wheeled round upon the frightened woman, rearing, snorting, and showing his long, yellow teeth. Sary fled at once and barred the door behind her; but neither she nor Scott ever saw their "gift horse" again. For aught I know he still roams the Adirondack forest, and maybe personates the ghostly and ghastly white deer of song and legend. Who can tell? But he was lifted off Scott Peck's shoulders, and all Scott said by way of epitaph on the departed, when he came home to find his white steed gone, was, "Hang presents!"
"Samantha Allen" will now have "a brief opportunity for remark."