“I’ll tell you the whole story, love.  Just after you left he took a severe cold, and he coughed incessantly.  You could hear him cough for miles.  All the neighbors complained of it, and Mr. Potts, next door, was so mad that he shot at the horse four times.  Patrick said it was whooping-cough.”

“Whooping-cough, darling!  Impossible!  A horse never has whooping-cough.”

“Well, Patrick said so.  And as I always give paregoric to the children when they cough, I concluded that it would be good for the horse, so I bought a bucketful and gave it to him with sugar.”

“A bucketful of paregoric, my love!  It was enough to kill him.”

“Patrick said that was a regular dose for a horse of sedentary habits; and it didn’t kill him:  it put him to sleep.  You will be surprised, dear, to learn that the horse slept straight ahead for four weeks.  Never woke up once.  I was frightened about it, but Patrick told me that it was a sign of a good horse.  He said that Dexter often slept six months on a stretch, and that once they took Goldsmith Maid to a race while she was sound asleep and she trotted a mile in 2:15, I think he said, without getting awake.”

“Patrick said that, did he?”

“Yes; that was at the end of the second week.  But as the horse didn’t rouse up, Patrick said it couldn’t be the paregoric that kept him asleep so long; and he came to me and asked me not to mention it, but he had suspicions that Mr. Fogg had mesmerized him.”

“I never heard of a horse being mesmerized, dearest.”

“Neither did I, but Patrick said it was a common thing with the better class of horses.  And when he kept on sleeping, dear, I got frightened, and Patrick consulted the horse-doctor, who came over with a galvanic battery, which he said would wake the horse.  They fixed the wires to his leg and turned on the current.  It did rouse him.  He got up and kicked fourteen boards out of the side of the stable and then jumped the fence into Mr. Potts’ yard, where he trod on a litter of young pigs, kicked two cows to death and bit the tops off of eight apple trees.  Patrick said he tried to swallow Mrs. Potts’ baby, but I didn’t see him do that.  Patrick may have exaggerated.  I don’t know.  It seems hardly likely, does it, that the horse would actually try to eat a child?”

“The man that sold him to me didn’t mention that he was fond of babies.”

“But he got over the attack.  The only effect was that the paregoric or the electricity, or something, turned his hair all the wrong way, and he looks the queerest you ever saw.  Oh yes; it did seem to affect his appetite, too.  He appeared to be always hungry.  He ate up the hay-rack and two sets of harness.  And one night he broke out and nibbled off all the door-knobs on the back of the house.”

“Door-knobs, Emma?  Has he shown a fondness for door-knobs?”

“Yes; and he ate Louisa’s hymn-book, too.  She left it lying on the table on the porch.  Patrick said he knew a man in Ireland whose horse would starve to death unless they fed him on Bibles.  If he couldn’t get Bibles, he’d take Testaments; but unless he got Scriptures of some kind, he was utterly intractable.”