The Project Gutenberg EBook of Buying a Horse, by William Dean Howells

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Title: Buying a Horse

Author: William Dean Howells

Release Date: October 14, 2007 [EBook #23030]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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BUYING A HORSE

BY WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

_The Riverside Press Cambridge_
1916

COPYRIGHT, 1879
BY HOUGHTON, OSGOOD & CO.

COPYRIGHT, 1916
BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

BUYING A HORSE

If one has money enough, there seems no reason why one should not go and
buy such a horse as he wants. This is the commonly accepted theory, on
which the whole commerce in horses is founded, and on which my friend
proceeded.

He was about removing from Charlesbridge, where he had lived many happy
years without a horse, farther into the country, where there were
charming drives and inconvenient distances, and where a horse would be
very desirable, if not quite necessary. But as a horse seemed at first
an extravagant if not sinful desire, he began by talking vaguely round,
and rather hinting than declaring that he thought somewhat of buying.
The professor to whom he first intimated his purpose flung himself from
his horse's back to the grassy border of the sidewalk where my friend
stood, and said he would give him a few points. "In the first place
don't buy a horse that shows much daylight under him, unless you buy a
horse-doctor _with_ him; get a short-legged horse; and he ought to be
short and thick in the barrel,"--or words to that effect. "Don't get a
horse with a narrow forehead: there are horse-fools as well as the other
kind, and you want a horse with room for brains. And look out that he's
_all right forward_."

"What's that?" asked my friend, hearing this phrase for the first time.

"That he isn't tender in his fore-feet,--that the hoof isn't