There was a man moving about at the other end of the stable, and long before he saw me, I knew that it was Mr. Wood.  What a nice, clean stable he had!  There was always a foul smell coming out of Jenkins’s stable, but here the air seemed as pure inside as outside.  There was a number of little gratings in the wall to let in the fresh air, and they were so placed that drafts would not blow on the horses.  Mr. Wood was going from one horse to another, giving them hay, and talking to them in a cheerful voice.  At last he spied me, and cried out, “The top of the morning to you, Joe!  You are up early.  Don’t come too near the horses, good dog,” as I walked in beside him; “they might think you are another Bruno, and give you a sly bite or kick.  I should have shot him long ago.  ’Tis hard to make a good dog suffer for a bad one, but that’s the way of the world.  Well, old fellow, what do you think of my horse stable?  Pretty fair, isn’t it?” And Mr. Wood went on talking to me as he fed and groomed his horses, till I soon found out that his chief pride was in them.

I like to have human beings talk to me.  Mr. Morris often reads his sermons to me, and Miss Laura tells me secrets that I don’t think she would tell to any one else.

I watched Mr. Wood carefully, while he groomed a huge, gray cart-horse, that he called Dutchman.  He took a brush in his right hand, and a curry-comb in his left, and he curried and brushed every part of the horse’s skin, and afterward wiped him with a cloth.  “A good grooming is equal to two quarts of oats, Joe,” he said to me.

Then he stooped down and examined the horse’s hoofs.  “Your shoes are too heavy, Dutchman,” he said; “but that pig-headed blacksmith thinks he knows more about horses than I do.  ‘Don’t cut the sole nor the frog,’ I say to him.  ’Don’t pare the hoof so much, and don’t rasp it; and fit your shoe to the foot, and not the foot to the shoe,’ and he looks as if he wanted to say, ‘Mind your own business.’  We’ll not go to him again.  ‘’Tis hard to teach an old dog new tricks.’  I got you to work for me, not to wear out your strength in lifting about his weighty shoes.”

Mr. Wood stopped talking for a few minutes, and whistled a tune.  Then he began again.  “I’ve made a study of horses, Joe.  Over forty years I’ve studied them, and it’s my opinion that the average horse knows more than the average man that drives him.  When I think of the stupid fools that are goading patient horses about, beating them and misunderstanding them, and thinking they are only clods of earth with a little life in them, I’d like to take their horses out of the shafts and harness them in, and I’d trot them off at a pace, and slash them, and jerk them, till I guess they’d come out with a little less patience than the animal does.