doors waiting for invalids to rehearse all their pains.  Then the minister hires me, and I have to stay till Mrs. Tittle-Tattle has time to tell the dominie all the disagreeable things of the parish.

The other night, after our owner had gone home and the hostlers were asleep, we held an indignation meeting in our livery stable.  “Old Sorrel” presided, and there was a long line of vice-presidents and secretaries, mottled bays and dappled grays and chestnuts, and Shetland and Arabian ponies.  “Charley,” one of the old inhabitants of the stable, began a speech, amid great stamping on the part of the audience.  But he soon broke down for lack of wind.  For five years he had been suffering with the “heaves.”  Then “Pompey,” a venerable nag, took his place; and though he had nothing to say, he held out his spavined leg, which dramatic posture excited the utmost enthusiasm of the audience.  “Fanny Shetland,” the property of a lady, tried to damage the meeting by saying that horses had no wrongs.  She said, “Just look at my embroidered blanket.  I never go out when the weather is bad.  Everybody who comes near pats me on the shoulder.  What can be more beautiful than going out on a sunshiny afternoon to make an excursion through the park, amid the clatter of the hoofs of the stallions?  I walk, or pace, or canter, or gallop, as I choose.  Think of the beautiful life we live, with the prospect, after our easy work is done, of going up and joining Elijah’s horses of fire.”

Next, I took the floor, and said that I was born in a warm, snug Pennsylvania barn; was, on my father’s side, descended from Bucephalus; on my mother’s side, from a steed that Queen Elizabeth rode in a steeple chase.  My youth was passed in clover pastures and under trusses of sweet-smelling hay.  I flung my heels in glee at the farmer when he came to catch me.  But on a dark day I was over-driven, and my joints stiffened, and my fortunes went down, and my whole family was sold.  My brother, with head down and sprung in the knees, pulls the street car.  My sister makes her living on the tow path, hearing the canal boys swear.  My aunt died of the epizooetic.  My uncle—­blind, and afflicted with the bots, the ringbone and the spring-halt—­wanders about the commons, trying to persuade somebody to shoot him.  And here I stand, old and sick, to cry out against the wrongs of horses—­the saddles that gall, the spurs that prick, the snaffles that pinch, the loads that kill.

At this a vicious-looking nag, with mane half pulled out, and a “watch-eye,” and feet “interfering,” and a tail from which had been subtracted enough hair to make six “waterfalls,” squealed out the suggestion that it was time for a rebellion, and she moved that we take the field, and that all those who could kick should kick, and that all those who could bite should bite, and that all those who could bolt should bolt, and that all those who could run away should