Beautiful Joe

“But, uncle,” said Miss Laura, “isn’t there such a thing as hydrophobia?”

“Oh, yes; I dare say there is. I believe that a careful examination of the records of death reported in Boston from hydrophobia for the space of thirty-two years, shows that two people actually died from it. Dogs are like all other animals. They’re liable to sickness, and they’ve got to be watched. I think my horses would go mad if I starved them, or over-fed them, or over-worked them, or let them stand in laziness, or kept them dirty, or didn’t give them water enough. They’d get some disease, anyway. If a person owns an animal, let him take care of it, and it’s all right. If it shows signs of sickness, shut it up and watch it. If the sickness is incurable, kill it. Here’s a sure way to prevent hydrophobia. Kill off all ownerless and vicious dogs. If you can’t do that, have plenty of water where they can get at it. A dog that has all the water he wants, will never go mad. This dog of mine has not one single thing the matter with him but pure ugliness. Yet, if I let him loose, and he ran through the village with his tongue out, I’ll warrant you there’d be a cry of ‘mad dog!’ However, I’m going to kill him. I’ve no use for a bad dog. Have plenty of animals, I say, and treat them kindly, but if there’s a vicious one among them, put it out of the way, for it is a constant danger to man and beast. It’s queer how ugly some people are about their dogs. They’ll keep them no matter how they worry other people, and even when they’re snatching the bread out of their neighbors’ mouths. But I say that is not the fault of the four-legged dog. A human dog is the worst of all. There’s a band of sheep-killing dogs here in Riverdale, that their owners can’t, or won’t, keep out of mischief. Meek-looking fellows some of them are. The owners go to bed at night, and the dogs pretend to go, too; but when the house is quiet and the family asleep, off goes Rover or Fido to worry poor, defenseless creatures that can’t defend themselves. Their taste for sheep’s blood is like the taste for liquor in men, and the dogs will travel as far to get their fun, as the men will travel for theirs. They’ve got it in them, and you can’t get it out.”

“Mr. Windham cured his dog,” said Mrs. Wood.

Mr. Wood burst into a hearty laugh. “So he did, so he did. I must tell Laura about that. Windham is a neighbor of ours, and last summer I kept telling him that his collie was worrying my Shropshires. He wouldn’t believe me, but I knew I was right, and one night when Harry was home, he lay in wait for the dog and lassoed him. I tied him up and sent for Windham. You should have seen his face, and the dog’s face. He said two words, ‘You scoundrel!’ and the dog cowered at his feet as if he had been shot. He was a fine dog, but he’d got corrupted by evil companions. Then Windham asked me where my sheep were. I told him in the pasture. He asked me if I still had my old ram Bolton. I said yes, and then he wanted eight or ten feet of rope. I gave it to him, and wondered what on earth he was going to do with it. He tied one end of it to the dog’s collar, and holding the other in his hand, set out for the pasture. He asked us to go with him, and when he got there, he told Harry he’d like to see him catch Bolton. There wasn’t any need to catch him, he’d come to us like a dog. Harry whistled, and when Bolton came up, Windham fastened the rope’s end to his horns, and let him go. The ram was frightened and ran, dragging the dog with him. We let them out of the pasture into an open field, and for a few minutes there was such a racing and chasing over that field as I never saw before. Harry leaned up against the bars and laughed till the tears rolled down his cheeks. Then Bolton got mad, and began to make battle with the dog, pitching into him with his horns. We soon stopped that, for the spirit had all gone out of Dash. Windham unfastened the rope, and told him to get home, and if ever I saw a dog run, that one did. Mrs. Windham set great store by him, and her husband didn’t want to kill him. But he said Dash had got to give up his sheep-killing, if he wanted to live. That cured him. He’s never worried a sheep from that day to this, and if you offer him a bit of sheep’s wool now, he tucks his tail between his legs, and runs for home. Now, I must stop my talk, for we’re in sight of the farm. Yonder’s our boundary line, and there’s the house. You’ll see a difference in the trees since you were here before.”

We had come to a turn in the road where the ground sloped gently upward. We turned in at the gate, and drove between rows of trees up to a long, low; red house, with a veranda all round it. There was a wide lawn in front, and away on our right were the farm buildings. They too, were painted red, and there were some trees by them that Mr. Wood called his windbreak, because they kept the snow from drifting in the winter time.

I thought it was a beautiful place. Miss Laura had been here before, but not for some years, so she, too, was looking about quite eagerly.

“Welcome to Dingley Farm, Joe,” said Mrs. Wood, with her jolly laugh, as she watched me jump from the carriage seat to the ground. “Come in, and I’ll introduce you to pussy.”

“Aunt Hattie, why is the farm called Dingley Farm?” said Miss Laura, as we went into the house. “It ought to be Wood Farm.”

“Dingley is made out of ‘dingle,’ Laura. You know that pretty hollow back of the pasture? It is what they call a ‘dingle.’ So this farm was called Dingle Farm till the people around about got saying ‘Dingley’ instead. I suppose they found it easier. Why, here is Lolo coming to see Joe.”

Walking along the wide hall that ran through the house was a large tortoise-shell cat. She had a prettily marked face, and she was waving her large tail like a flag, and mewing kindly to greet her mistress. But when she saw me what a face she made. She flew on the hall table, and putting up her back till it almost lifted her feet from the ground, began to spit at me and bristle with rage.

“Poor Lolo,” said Mrs. Wood, going up to her. “Joe is a good dog, and not like Bruno. He won’t hurt you.”

I wagged myself about a little, and looked kindly at her, but she did nothing but say bad words to me. It was weeks and weeks before I made friends with that cat. She was a young thing, and had known only one dog, and he was a bad one, so she supposed all dogs were like him.

There was a number of rooms opening off the hall, and one of them was the dining room where they had tea. I lay on a rug outside the door and watched them. There was a small table spread with a white cloth, and it had pretty dishes and glassware on it, and a good many different kinds of things to eat. A little French girl, called Adele, kept coming and going from the kitchen to give them hot cakes, and fried eggs, and hot coffee. As soon as they finished their tea, Mrs. Wood gave me one of the best meals that I ever had in my life.

CHAPTER XVII MR. WOOD AND HIS HORSES

THE morning after we arrived in Riverdale, I was up very early and walking around the house. I slept in the woodshed, and could run outdoors whenever I liked.

The woodshed was at the back of the house and near it was the tool shed. Then there was a carriage house, and a plank walk leading to the barnyard.

I ran up this walk, and looked into the first building I came to. It was the horse stable. A door stood open, and the morning sun was glancing in. There were several horses there, some with their heads toward me, and some with their tails. I saw that instead of being tied up, there were gates outside their stalls, and they could stand in any way they liked.

There was a man moving about at the other end of the stable, and long before he saw me, I knew that it was Mr. Wood. What a nice, clean stable he had! There was always a foul smell coming out of Jenkins’s stable, but here the air seemed as pure inside as outside. There was a number of little gratings in the wall to let in the fresh air, and they were so placed that drafts would not blow on the horses. Mr. Wood was going from one horse to another, giving them hay, and talking to them in a cheerful voice. At last he spied me, and cried out, “The top of the morning to you, Joe! You are up early. Don’t come too near the horses, good dog,” as I walked in beside him; “they might think you are another Bruno, and give you a sly bite or kick. I should have shot him long ago. ‘Tis hard to make a good dog suffer for a bad one, but that’s the way of the world. Well, old fellow, what do you think of my horse stable? Pretty fair, isn’t it?” And Mr. Wood went on talking to me as he fed and groomed his horses, till I soon found out that his chief pride was in them.

I like to have human beings talk to me. Mr. Morris often reads his sermons to me, and Miss Laura tells me secrets that I don’t think she would tell to any one else.

I watched Mr. Wood carefully, while he groomed a huge, gray cart-horse, that he called Dutchman. He took a brush in his right hand, and a curry-comb in his left, and he curried and brushed every part of the horse’s skin, and afterward wiped him with a cloth. “A good grooming is equal to two quarts of oats, Joe,” he said to me.

Then he stooped down and examined the horse’s hoofs. “Your shoes are too heavy, Dutchman,” he said; “but that pig-headed blacksmith thinks he knows more about horses than I do. ‘Don’t cut the sole nor the frog,’ I say to him. ‘Don’t pare the hoof so much, and don’t rasp it; and fit your shoe to the foot, and not the foot to the shoe,’ and he looks as if he wanted to say, ‘Mind your own business.’ We’ll not go to him again. ‘’Tis hard to teach an old dog new tricks.’ I got you to work for me, not to wear out your strength in lifting about his weighty shoes.”

Mr. Wood stopped talking for a few minutes, and whistled a tune. Then he began again. “I’ve made a study of horses, Joe. Over forty years I’ve studied them, and it’s my opinion that the average horse knows more than the average man that drives him. When I think of the stupid fools that are goading patient horses about, beating them and misunderstanding them, and thinking they are only clods of earth with a little life in them, I’d like to take their horses out of the shafts and harness them in, and I’d trot them off at a pace, and slash them, and jerk them, till I guess they’d come out with a little less patience than the animal does.

“Look at this Dutchman see the size of him. You’d think he hadn’t any more nerves than a bit of granite. Yet he’s got a skin as sensitive as a girl’s. See how he quivers if I run the curry comb too harshly over him. The idiot I got him from didn’t know what was the matter with him. He’d bought him for a reliable horse, and there he was, kicking and stamping whenever the boy went near him. ‘Your boy’s got too heavy a hand, Deacon Jones,’ said I, when he described the horse’s actions to me. ‘You may depend upon it, a four-legged creature, unlike a two-legged one, has a reason for everything he does.’ ‘But he’s only a draught horse,’ said Deacon Jones. ‘Draught horse or no draught horse,’ said I, ‘you’re describing a horse with a tender skin to me, and I don’t care if he’s as big as an elephant.’ Well, the old man grumbled and said he didn’t want any thoroughbred airs in his stable, so I bought you, didn’t I, Dutchman?” and Mr. Wood stroked him kindly and went to the next stall.

In each stall was a small tank of water with a sliding cover, and I found out afterward that these covers were put on when a horse came in too heated to have a drink. At any other time, he could drink all he liked. Mr. Wood believed in having plenty of pure water for all his animals and they all had their own place to get a drink.

Even I had a little bowl of water in the woodshed, though I could easily have run up to the barnyard when I wanted a drink. As soon as I came, Mrs. Wood asked Adele to keep it there for me and when I looked up gratefully at her, she said: “Every animal should have its own feeding place and its own sleeping place, Joe; that is only fair.”

The next horses Mr. Wood groomed were the black ones, Cleve and Pacer. Pacer had something wrong with his mouth, and Mr. Wood turned back his lips and examined it carefully. This he was able to do, for there were large windows in the stable and it was as light as Mr. Wood’s house was.

“No dark corners here, eh Joe!” said Mr. Wood, as he came out of the stall and passed me to get a bottle from a shelf. “When this stable was built, I said no dirt holes for careless men here. I want the sun to shine in the corners, and I don’t want my horses to smell bad smells, for they hate them, and I don’t want them starting when they go into the light of day, just because they’ve been kept in a black hole of a stable, and I’ve never had a. sick horse yet.”

He poured something from a bottle into a saucer and went back to Pacer with it. I followed him and stood outside. Mr. Wood seemed to be washing a sore in the horse’s mouth. Pacer winced a little, and Mr. Wood said: “Steady, steady, my beauty; ‘twill soon be over.”

The horse fixed his intelligent eyes on his master and looked as if he knew that he was trying to do him good.

“Just look at these lips, Joe,” said Mr. Wood “delicate and fine like our own, and yet there are brutes that will jerk them as if they were made of iron. I wish the Lord would give horses voices just for one week. I tell you they’d scare some of us. Now, Pacer, that’s over. I’m not going to dose you much, for I don’t believe in it. If a horse has got a serious trouble, get a good horse doctor, say I. If it’s a simple thing, try a simple remedy. There’s been many a good horse drugged and dosed to death. Well, Scamp, my beauty, how are you, this morning?”

In the stall next to Pacer, was a small, jet-black mare, with a lean head, slender legs, and a curious restless manner. She was a regular greyhound of a horse, no spare flesh, yet wiry and able to do a great deal of work. She was a wicked looking little thing, so I thought I had better keep at a safe distance from her heels.

Mr. Wood petted her a great deal and I saw that she was his favorite. “Saucebox,” he exclaimed, when she pretended to bite him, “you know if you bite me, I’ll bite back again. I think I’ve conquered you,” he said, proudly, as he stroked her glossy neck; “but what a dance you led me. Do you remember how I bought you for a mere song, because you had a bad habit of turning around like a flash in front of anything that frightened you, and bolting off the other way? And how did I cure you, my beauty? Beat you and make you stubborn? Not I. I let you go round and round; I turned you and twisted you, the oftener the better for me, till at last I got it into your pretty head that turning and twisting was addling your brains, and you had better let me be master.

“You’ve minded me from that day, haven’t you? Horse, or man, or dog aren’t much good till they learn to obey, and I’ve thrown you down and I’ll do it again if you bite me, so take care.”

Scamp tossed her pretty head, and took little pieces of Mr. Wood’s shirt sleeve in her mouth, keeping her cunning brown eye on him as if to see how far she could go. But she did not bite him. I think she loved him, for when he left her she whinnied shrilly, and he had to go back and stroke and caress her.

After that I often used to watch her as she went about the farm. She always seemed to be tugging and striving at her load, and trying to step out fast and do a great deal of work. Mr. Wood was usually driving her. The men didn’t like her, and couldn’t manage her. She had not been properly broken in.

After Mr. Wood finished his work he went and stood in the doorway. There were six horses altogether: Dutchman, Cleve, Pacer, Scamp, a bay mare called Ruby, and a young horse belonging to Mr. Harry, whose name was Fleetfoot.

“What do you think of them all?” said Mr. Wood, looking down at me. “A pretty fine-looking lot of horses, aren’t they? Not a thoroughbred there, but worth as much to me as if each had pedigree as long as this plank walk. There’s a lot of humbug about this pedigree business in horses. Mine have their manes and tails anyway, and the proper use of their eyes, which is more liberty than some thoroughbreds get.

“I’d like to see the man that would persuade me to put blinders or check-reins or any other instrument of torture on my horses. Don’t the simpletons know that blinders are the cause of well, I wouldn’t like to say how many of our accidents, Joe, for fear you’d think me extravagant. and the check-rein drags up a horse’s head out of its fine natural curve and presses sinews, bones, and joints together, till the horse is well-nigh mad. Ah, Joe, this is a cruel world for man or beast. You’re a standing token of that, with your missing ears and tail. And now I’ve got to go and be cruel, and shoot that dog. He must be disposed of before anyone else is astir. How I hate to take life.”

He sauntered down the walk to the tool shed, went in and soon came out leading a large, brown dog by a chain. This was Bruno. He was snapping and snarling and biting at his chain as he went along, though Mr. Wood led him very kindly, and when he saw me he acted as if he could have torn me to pieces. After Mr. Wood took him behind the barn, he came back and got his gun. I ran away so that I would not hear the sound of it, for I could not help feeling sorry for Bruno.

Miss Laura’s room was on one side of the house, and in the second story. There was a little balcony outside it, and when I got near I saw that she was standing out on it wrapped in a shawl. Her hair was streaming over her shoulders, and she was looking down into the garden where there were a great many white and yellow flowers in bloom.

I barked, and she looked at me. “Dear old Joe, I will get dressed and come down.”

She hurried into her room, and I lay on the veranda till I heard her step. Then I jumped up. She unlocked the front door, and we went for a walk down the lane to the road until we heard the breakfast bell. As soon as we heard it we ran back to the house, and Miss Laura had such an appetite for her breakfast that her aunt said the country had done her good already.

CHAPTER XVIII MRS. WOOD’S POULTRY

AFTER breakfast, Mrs. Wood put on a large apron, and going into the kitchen, said: “Have you any scraps for the hens, Adele? Be sure and not give me anything salty.”

The French girl gave her a dish of food, then Mrs. Wood asked Miss Laura to go and see her chickens, and away we went to the poultry house.

On the way we saw Mr. Wood. He was sitting on the step of the tool shed cleaning his gun “Is the dog dead?” asked Miss Laura.

“Yes,” he said.

She sighed and said: “Poor creature, I am sorry he had to be killed. Uncle, what is the most merciful way to kill a dog? Sometimes, when they get old, they should be put out of the way.”

“You can shoot them,” he said, “or you can poison them. I shot Bruno through his head into his neck. There’s a right place to aim at. It’s a little one side of the top of the skull. If you’ll remind me I’ll show you a circular I have in the house. It tells the proper way to kill animals. The American Humane Education Society in Boston puts it out, and it’s a merciful thing.

“You don’t know anything about the slaughtering of animals, Laura, and it’s well you don’t. There’s an awful amount of cruelty practiced, and practiced by some people that think themselves pretty good. I wouldn’t have my lambs killed the way my father had his for a kingdom. I’ll never forget the first one I saw butchered. I wouldn’t feel worse at a hanging now. And that white ox, Hattie you remember my telling you about him. He had to be killed, and father sent for the butcher. I was only a lad, and I was all of a shudder to have the life of the creature I had known taken from him. The butcher, stupid clown, gave him eight blows before he struck the right place. The ox bellowed, and turned his great black eyes on my father, and I fell in a faint.”

Miss Laura turned away, and Mrs. Wood followed her, saying: “If ever you want to kill a cat, Laura, give it cyanide of potassium. I killed a poor old sick cat for Mrs. Windham the other day. We put half a teaspoonful of pure cyanide of potassium in a long-handled wooden spoon, and dropped it on the cat’s tongue, as near the throat as we could. Poor pussy she died in a few seconds. Do you know, I was reading such a funny thing the other day about giving cats medicine. They hate it, and one can scarcely force it into their mouths on account of their sharp teeth. The way is, to smear it on their sides, and they lick it off. A good idea, isn’t it? Here we are at the hen douse, or rather one of the hen houses.”

“Don’t you keep your hens all together?” asked Miss Laura.

“Only in the winter time,” said Mrs. Wood, “I divide my flock in the spring. Part of them stay here and part go to the orchard to live in little movable houses that we put about in different places. I feed each flock morning and evening at their own little house. They know they’ll get no food even if they come to my house, so they stay at home. And they know they’ll get no food between times, so all day long they pick and scratch in the orchard, and destroy so many bugs and insects that it more than pays for the trouble of keeping them there.”

“Doesn’t this flock want to mix up with the other?” asked Miss Laura, as she stepped into the little wooden house.

“No; they seem to understand. I keep my eye on them for a while at first, and they soon find out that they’re not to fly either over the garden fence or the orchard fence. They roam over the farm and pick up what they can get. There’s a good deal of sense in hens, if one manages them properly. I love them because they are such good mothers.”

We were in the little wooden house by this time, and I looked around it with surprise. It was better than some of the poor people’s houses in Fairport. The walls were white and clean, so were the little ladders that led up to different kinds of roosts, where the fowls sat at night. Some roosts were thin and round, and some were broad and flat. Mrs. Wood said that the broad ones were for a heavy fowl called the Brahma. Every part of the little house was almost as light as it was outdoors, on account of the large windows.

Miss Laura spoke of it. “Why, auntie, I never saw such a light hen house.”

Mrs. Wood was diving into a partly shut-in place, where it was not so light, and where the nests were. She straightened herself up, her face redder than ever, and looked at the windows with a pleased smile.

“Yes, there’s not a hen house in New Hampshire with such big windows. Whenever I look at them, I think of my mother’s hens, and wish that they could have had a place like this. They would have thought themselves in a hen’s paradise. When I was a girl we didn’t know that hens loved light and heat, and all winter they used to sit in a dark hencoop, and the cold was so bad that their combs would freeze stiff, and the tops of them would drop off. We never thought about it. If we’d had any sense, we might have watched them on a fine day go and sit on the compost heap and sun themselves, and then have concluded that if they liked light and heat outside, they’d like it inside. Poor biddies, they were so cold that they wouldn’t lay us any eggs in winter.”

“You take a great interest in your poultry, don’t you, auntie?” said Miss Laura.

“Yes, indeed, and well I may. I’ll show you my brown Leghorn, Jenny, that lay eggs enough in a year to pay for the newspapers I take to keep myself posted in poultry matters. I buy all my own clothes with my hen money, and lately I’ve started a bank account, for I want to save up enough to start a few stands of bees. Even if I didn’t want to be kind to my hens, it would pay me to be so for sake of the profit they yield. Of course they’re quite a lot of trouble. Sometimes they get vermin on them, and I have to grease them and dust carbolic acid on them, and try some of my numerous cures. Then I must keep ashes and dust wallows for them and be very particular about my eggs when hens are sitting, and see that the hens come off regularly for food and exercise. Oh, there are a hundred things I have to think of, but I always say to any one that thinks of raising poultry: ‘If you are going into the business for the purpose of making money, it pays to take care of them.’”

“There’s one thing I notice,” said Miss Laura, “and that is that your drinking fountains must be a great deal better than the shallow pans that I have seen some people give their hens water in.”