r something, turned his hair all the wrong way, and
he looks the queerest you ever saw. Oh yes; it did seem to affect his
appetite, too. He appeared to be always hungry. He ate up the hay-rack
and two sets of harness. And one night he broke out and nibbled off
all the door-knobs on the back of the house."

"Door-knobs, Emma? Has he shown a fondness for door-knobs?"

"Yes; and he ate Louisa's hymn-book, too. She left it lying on the
table on the porch. Patrick said he knew a man in Ireland whose horse
would starve to death unless they fed him on Bibles. If he couldn't
get Bibles, he'd take Testaments; but unless he got Scriptures of some
kind, he was utterly intractable."

"I would like to have had a look at that horse, sweet."

"So we got the horse-doctor again, and he said that what the poor
animal wanted was a hypodermic injection of morphia to calm his
nerves. He told Patrick to get a machine for placing the morphia under
the horse's skin. But Patrick said that he could do it without the
machine. So one day he got the morphia, and began to bore a hole in
the horse with a gimlet."

"A gimlet, Emma?"

"An ordinary gimlet. But it seemed unpleasant to the horse, and so he
kicked Patrick through the partition, breaking three of his ribs. Then
I got the doctor to perform the operation properly, and the horse
after that appeared right well, excepting that Patrick said that he
had suddenly acquired an extraordinary propensity for standing on his
head."

"He is the first horse that ever wanted to do that, love."

"Patrick said not. He told me about a man he worked for in Oshkosh who
had a team of mules which always stood on their heads when they were
not at work. He said all the mules in Oshkosh did. So Patrick tied a
heavy stone to our horse's tail to Balance him and keep him straight.
And this worked to a charm until I took the horse to church one
Sunday, when, while a crowd stood round him looking at him, he swung
his tail around and brained six boys with the stone."

"Brained them, love?"

"Well, I didn't see them myself, but Patrick told me, when I came out
of church, that they were as good as dead. And he said he remembered
that that Oshkosh man used to coax his mules to stand on their legs by
letting them hear music. It soothed them, he said. And so Patrick got
a friend to come around and sit in the stall and calm our horse by
playing on the accordion."

"Did it make him calmer?"

"It seemed to at first