had of it making friends with the other little
grunters. They were often let out in the pasture or orchard, and when
they were there, I could always single out Daddy from among them,
because he was the smartest. Though he had been brought up in such a
miserable way, he soon learned to take very good care of himself at
Dingley Farm, and it was amusing to see him when a storm was coming on,
running about in a state of great excitement carrying little bundles of
straw in his mouth to make himself a bed. He was a white pig, and was
always kept very clean. Mr. Wood said that it is wrong to keep pigs
dirty. They like to be clean as well as other animals, and if they were
kept so, human beings would not get so many diseases from eating their
flesh.
The cow, poor unhappy creature, never, as long as she lived on Dingley
Farm, lost a strange melancholy look from her eyes. I have heard it said
that animals forget past unhappiness, and perhaps some of them do. I
know that I have never forgotten my one miserable year with Jenkins,
and I have been a sober, thoughtful dog in consequence of it, and not
playful like some dogs who have never known what it is to be really
unhappy.
It always seemed to me that the Englishman's cow was thinking of her
poor dead calf, starved to death by her cruel master. She got well
herself, and came and went with the other cows, seemingly as happy as
they, but often when I watched her standing chewing her cud, and looking
away in the distance, I could see a difference between her face and the
faces of the cows that had always been happy on Dingley Farm. Even the
farm hands called her "Old Melancholy," and soon she got to be known by
that name, or Mel, for short. Until she got well, she was put into
the cow stable, where Mr. Wood's cows all stood at night upon raised
platforms of earth covered over with straw litter, and she was tied
with a Dutch halter, so that she could lie down and go to sleep when she
wanted to. When she got well, she was put out to pasture with the other
cows.
The horse they named "Scrub," because he could never be, under any
circumstance, anything but a broken-down, plain-looking animal. He
was put into the horse stable in a stall next Fleetfoot, and as the
partition was low, they could look over at each other. In time, by dint
of much doctoring, Scrub's hoofs became clean and sound and he was able
to do some work. Miss Laura petted him a great deal. She often took out
apples t
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