My father was a steadfast enthusiast on religious matters, and, of course, attended almost every sort of church-meeting, especially revival meetings.  They were occasionally held in summer, but mostly in winter when the sleighing was good and plenty of time available.  One hot summer day father drove Nob to Portage and back, twenty-four miles over a sandy road.  It was a hot, hard, sultry day’s work, and she had evidently been over-driven in order to get home in time for one of these meetings.  I shall never forget how tired and wilted she looked that evening when I unhitched her; how she drooped in her stall, too tired to eat or even to lie down.  Next morning it was plain that her lungs were inflamed; all the dreadful symptoms were just the same as my own when I had pneumonia.  Father sent for a Methodist minister, a very energetic, resourceful man, who was a blacksmith, farmer, butcher, and horse-doctor as well as minister; but all his gifts and skill were of no avail.  Nob was doomed.  We bathed her head and tried to get her to eat something, but she couldn’t eat, and in about a couple of weeks we turned her loose to let her come around the house and see us in the weary suffering and loneliness of the shadow of death.  She tried to follow us children, so long her friends and workmates and playmates.  It was awfully touching.  She had several hemorrhages, and in the forenoon of her last day, after she had had one of her dreadful spells of bleeding and gasping for breath, she came to me trembling, with beseeching, heartbreaking looks, and after I had bathed her head and tried to soothe and pet her, she lay down and gasped and died.  All the family gathered about her, weeping, with aching hearts.  Then dust to dust.

She was the most faithful, intelligent, playful, affectionate, human-like horse I ever knew, and she won all our hearts.  Of the many advantages of farm life for boys one of the greatest is the gaining a real knowledge of animals as fellow-mortals, learning to respect them and love them, and even to win some of their love.  Thus godlike sympathy grows and thrives and spreads far beyond the teachings of churches and schools, where too often the mean, blinding, loveless doctrine is taught that animals have neither mind nor soul, have no rights that we are bound to respect, and were made only for man, to be petted, spoiled, slaughtered, or enslaved.

At first we were afraid of snakes, but soon learned that most of them were harmless.  The only venomous species seen on our farm were the rattlesnake and the copperhead, one of each.  David saw the rattler, and we both saw the copperhead.  One day, when my brother came in from his work, he reported that he had seen a snake that made a queer buzzy noise with its tail.  This was the only rattlesnake seen on our farm, though we heard of them being common on limestone hills eight or ten miles distant.  We discovered the copperhead when we were ploughing, and we saw and felt at the first long, fixed, half-charmed,