e horse destinies are shuffled by
reckless and unthinking hands. Also its doors open on the four corners
of the world's crossed highways. You might go from there to find your
work waiting between the shafts of a baker's cart just around the
corner, or you might be sent across seas to die miserably of tsetse
stings on the South African veldt.

Neither of these things happened to Silver. It occurred that his arrival
at the sales-stable was coincident with a rush order from the Street
Cleaning Department. So there he went. Fate, it seemed, had marked him
for municipal service.

There was no delay about his initiation. Into his forehoofs they branded
this shameful inscription: D. S. C. 937, on his back they flung a
forty-pound single harness with a dirty piece of canvas as a blanket.
They hooked him to an iron dump-cart, and then, with a heavy lashed
whip, they haled him forth at 5.30 a.m. to begin the inglorious work of
removing refuse from the city streets.

Perhaps you think Old Silver could not feel the disgrace, the ignominy
of it all. Could you have seen the lowered head, the limp-hung tail, the
dulled eyes and the dispirited sag of his quarters, you would have
thought differently.

It is one thing to jump a hook and ladder truck up Broadway to the
relief of a fire-threatened block, and quite another to plod humbly
along the curb from ash-can to ash-can. How Silver did hate those cans.
Each one should have been for him a signal to stop. But it was not. In
consequence, he was yanked to a halt every two minutes.

Sometimes he would crane his neck and look mournfully around at the
unsightly leg which he had come to understand was the cause of all his
misery. There would come into his great eyes a look of such pitiful
melancholy that one might almost fancy tears rolling out. Then he would
be roused by an exasperated driver, who jerked cruelly on the lines and
used his whip as if it had been a flail.

When the cart was full Silver must drag it half across the city to the
riverfront, and up a steep runway from the top of which its contents
were dumped into the filthy scows that waited below. At the end of each
monotonous, wearisome day he jogged stiffly to the uninviting stables,
where he was roughly ushered into a dark, damp stall.

To another horse, unused to anything better, the life would not have
seemed hard. Of oats and hay there were fair quantities, and there was
more or less hasty grooming. But to Silver, a