me time, while he was busy
thinking over a silver four-pronged fork in his hand. At length a broad
smile played over his manly features, as the novel-makers say, and he
opened--

"Well, I'm jiggered!--ha! ha! _they've got to eating soup with split
spoons, too!_"

Old Maguire and his Horse Bonny Doon.

Few animals possess the sagacity of the horse; passive and obedient,
they are easily trained; bring them up the way you want them to go, and
they'll go it! The horse in his old age does not forget the precepts of
his youth. A very touching anecdote is told of a horse, in the cavalry
service of the British army, during Napoleon's time. After the battle of
Waterloo, when the combined force of Europe, through chicanery--not
valor--defeated the greatest soldier the world ever saw, the British
army was cut down, rank and file--Napoleon having promised to "be a good
boy," and let 'em alone in future. Among the _cut offs_, was a troop of
horse, and in this troop was an old veteran Bucephalus, who had stood
and made charges, smelt fire and brimstone, faced phalanxes of bayonets,
and clashed rough-shod over many bloody fields, besides Waterloo,--this
old fellow was turned out to grass--cashiered. When the balance of his
retained companions in saddle were leaving the town where the
dismemberment had taken place, the old war horse was quietly grazing in
a field; the troop passed--the bugler "sounded his horn," and in less
than forty winks the old old horse was up, off, over fences, and in the
front ranks! The tenacity with which he clung to his place in the column
caused--says the historian--the officers and men to shed tears.

So much by way of a prelude. Now for old Maguire and his horse. Some
years ago, in the interior of Ohio, there did live an old Irish
jintleman, who not only had a fine estate, but likewise a saw-mill, and
as fine an old black mare as ever the rays of a noonday's sun lit down
upon. "Bonny Doon," Maguire's old mare, was a wonderful "critter;" she
opened gates, let down bars, seized the pump handle by her teeth, and
actually extracted water from the barn-yard well, with all the facility
of a regular double-fisted _genus homo_. As a sly old joker, she had
performed various tricks, such as nipping off the tails of sucking
calves, catching chickens in her manger, and making various pieces of
them, and kicking in the ribs of strange dogs and horned cattle. But to
the eccentric habits and bacchanalian cust