I shall never forget seeing my dear Miss Laura going into that wet and filthy log house, holding up her white dress in her hands, her face a picture of pain and horror.  There were two rough stalls in it, and in the first one was tied a cow, with a calf lying beside her.  I could never have believed, if I had not seen it with my own eyes, that an animal could get so thin as that cow was.  Her backbone rose up high and sharp, her hip bones stuck away out, and all her body seemed shrunken in.  There were sores on her sides, and the smell from her stall was terrible.  Miss Laura gave one cry of pity, then with a very pale face she dropped her dress, and seizing a little penknife from her pocket, she hacked at the rope that tied the cow to the manger, and cut it so that the cow could lie down.  The first thing the poor cow did was to lick her calf, but it was quite dead.  I used to think Jenkins’s cows were thin enough, but he never had one that looked like this.  Her head was like the head of a skeleton, and her eyes had such a famished look, that I turned away, sick at heart, to think that she had suffered so.

When the cow lay down, the moaning noise stopped, for she had been making it.  Miss Laura ran outdoors, snatched a handful of grass and took it in to her.  The cow ate it gratefully, but slowly, for her strength seemed all gone.

Miss Laura then went into the other stall to see if there was any creature there.  There had been a horse.  There was now a lean, gaunt-looking animal lying on the ground, that seemed as if he was dead.  There was a heavy rope knotted round his neck, and fastened to his empty rack.  Miss Laura stepped carefully between his feet, cut the rope and going outside the stall spoke kindly to him.  He moved his ears slightly, raised his head, tried to get up, fell back again, tried again, and succeeded in staggering outdoors after Miss Laura, who kept encouraging him, and then he fell down on the grass.

Fleetfoot stared at the miserable-looking creature as if he did not know what it was.  The horse had no sores on his body, as the cow had, nor was he quite so lean; but he was the weakest, most distressed-looking animal that I ever saw.  The flies settled on him, and Miss Laura had to keep driving them away.  He was a white horse, with some kind of pale-colored eyes, and whenever he turned them on Miss Laura, she would look away.  She did not cry, as she often did over the sick and suffering animals.  This seemed too bad for tears.  She just hovered over that poor horse with her face as white as her dress, and an expression of fright in her eyes.  Oh, how dirty he was!  I would never have imagined that a horse could get in such a condition.

All this had only taken a few minutes, and just after she got the horse out, Mr. Harry appeared.  He came out of the house with a slow step, that quickened to a run when he saw Miss Laura.  “Laura!” he exclaimed, “what are you doing?” Then he stopped and looked at the horse, not in amazement, but very sorrowfully.  “Barron is gone,” he said, and crumpling up a piece of paper, he put it in his pocket “What is to be done for these animals?  There is a cow, isn’t there?”