The Project Gutenberg EBook of The One Hoss Shay, by Oliver Wendell Holmes

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Title: The One Hoss Shay
With its Companion Poems How the Old Horse Won the Bet &
The Broomstick Train

Author: Oliver Wendell Holmes

Illustrator: Howard Pyle

Release Date: October 18, 2009 [EBook #30279]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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[Illustration: Y^e Deacon]

The One Hoss Shay

_With its Companion Poems_

How the Old Horse Won the Bet
&
The Broomstick Train

By Oliver Wendell Holmes

_With Illustrations by_
Howard Pyle

[Illustration]

_Boston and New York_
Houghton, Mifflin and Company
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
M DCCC XCII

Copyright, 1858, 1877, 1886, and 1890,
BY OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.

Copyright, 1891,
BY HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.

_All rights reserved._

_The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U.S.A._
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co.

Preface

My publishers suggested the bringing together of the three poems here
presented to the reader as being to some extent alike in their general
character. "The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay" is a perfectly intelligible
conception, whatever material difficulties it presents. It is
conceivable that a being of an order superior to humanity should so
understand the conditions of matter that he could construct a machine
which should go to pieces, if not into its constituent atoms, at a given
moment of the future. The mind may take a certain pleasure in this
picture of the impossible. The event follows as a logical consequence of
the presupposed condition of things.

There is a practical lesson to be got out of the story. Observation
shows us in what point any particular mechanism is most likely to give
way. In a wagon, for instance, the weak point is where the axle enters
the hub or nave. When the wagon breaks down, three times o