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Billy’s former owners made a feint of supplying other horses in his place, but the only horse supplied was an aged veteran with the scratches, who must have come seven early in our era, and who, from his habit of getting about on tiptoe, must have been tender for’a’d beyond anything of my friend’s previous experience. Probably if he could have waited they might have replaced Billy in time, but their next installment from the West produced nothing suited to his wants but a horse with the presence and carriage of a pig, and he preferred to let them sell Billy for what he would bring, and to trust his fate elsewhere. Billy had fallen nearly one half in value, and he brought very little–to his owner; though the new purchaser was afterwards reported to value him at much more than what my friend had paid for him. These things are really mysteries; you cannot fathom them; it is idle to try. My friend remained grieving over his own folly and carelessness, with a fond hankering for the poor little horse he had lost, and the belief that he should never find such another. Yet he was not without a philanthropist’s consolation. He had added to the stock of harmless pleasures in a degree of which he could not have dreamed. All his acquaintance knew that he had bought a horse, and they all seemed now to conspire in asking him how he got on with it. He was forced to confess the truth. On hearing it, his friends burst into shouts of laughter, and smote their persons, and stayed themselves against lamp-posts and house-walls. They begged his pardon, and then they began again, and shouted and roared anew. Since the gale which blew down the poet —-‘s chimneys and put him to the expense of rebuilding them, no joke so generally satisfactory had been offered to the community. My friend had, in his time, achieved the reputation of a wit by going about and and saying, “Did you know —-‘s chimneys had blown down?” and he had now himself the pleasure of causing the like quality of wit in others.

Having abandoned the hope of getting anything out of the people who had sold him Billy, he was for a time the prey of an inert despair, in which he had not even spirit to repine at the disorder of a universe in which he could not find a horse. No horses were now offered to him, for it had become known throughout the trade that he had bought a horse. He had therefore to set about counteracting this impression with what feeble powers were left him. Of the facts of that period he remembers with confusion and remorse the trouble to which he put the owner of the pony-horse Pansy, whom he visited repeatedly in a neighboring town, at a loss of time and money to himself, and with no result but to embarrass Pansy’s owner in his relations with people who had hired him and did not wish him sold. Something of the old baffling mystery hung over Pansy’s whereabouts; he was with difficulty produced, and when en evidence he was not the Pansy my friend had expected. He paltered with his regrets; he covered his disappointment with what pretenses he could; and he waited till he could telegraph back his adverse decision. His conclusion was that, next to proposing marriage, there was no transaction of life that involved so many delicate and complex relations as buying a horse, and that the rupture of a horse-trade was little less embarrassing and distressing to all concerned than a broken engagement. There was a terrible intimacy in the affair; it was alarmingly personal. He went about sorrowing for the pain and disappointment he had inflicted on many amiable people of all degrees who had tried to supply him with a horse.