d by him, it had been his manner, or vanity, or call it
what you will,--to run into the opposite extreme.--In the language of
the county where he dwelt, he was said to have loved a good horse, and
generally had one of the best in the whole parish standing in his stable
always ready for saddling: and as the nearest midwife, as I told you,
did not live nearer to the village than seven miles, and in a vile
country,--it so fell out that the poor gentleman was scarce a whole week
together without some piteous application for his beast; and as he was
not an unkind-hearted man, and every case was more pressing and more
distressful than the last;--as much as he loved his beast, he had never
a heart to refuse him; the upshot of which was generally this; that
his horse was either clapp'd, or spavin'd, or greaz'd;--or he was
twitter-bon'd, or broken-winded, or something, in short, or other had
befallen him, which would let him carry no flesh;--so that he had every
nine or ten months a bad horse to get rid of,--and a good horse to
purchase in his stead.

What the loss in such a balance might amount to, communibus annis, I
would leave to a special jury of sufferers in the same traffick, to
determine;--but let it be what it would, the honest gentleman bore
it for many years without a murmur, till at length, by repeated ill
accidents of the kind, he found it necessary to take the thing under
consideration; and upon weighing the whole, and summing it up in his
mind, he found it not only disproportioned to his other expences, but
withal so heavy an article in itself, as to disable him from any other
act of generosity in his parish: Besides this, he considered that
with half the sum thus galloped away, he could do ten times as
much good;--and what still weighed more with him than all other
considerations put together, was this, that it confined all his charity
into one particular channel, and where, as he fancied, it was the least
wanted, namely, to the child-bearing and child-getting part of
his parish; reserving nothing for the impotent,--nothing for the
aged,--nothing for the many comfortless scenes he was hourly called
forth to visit, where poverty, and sickness and affliction dwelt
together.

For these reasons he resolved to discontinue the expence; and there
appeared but two possible ways to extricate him clearly out of it;--and
these were, either to make it an irrevocable law never more to lend his
steed upon any application wha