In the city, we get so many new _kicks_, and put on so many new ways of living and doing up things, that no wonder the quiet and matter-of-fact country folks make awkward mistakes, and get mixed up with our conventionalities, and other doings. Dining at the American, last week, we sat _vis-a-vis_ with an old-fashioned agricultural gent, whose plate of mock turtle remained cooling for some time, while he was busy thinking over a silver four-pronged fork in his hand. At length a broad smile played over his manly features, as the novel-makers say, and he opened--
"Well, I'm jiggered!--ha! ha! _they've got to eating soup with split spoons, too!_"
Few animals possess the sagacity of the horse; passive and obedient, they are easily trained; bring them up the way you want them to go, and they'll go it! The horse in his old age does not forget the precepts of his youth. A very touching anecdote is told of a horse, in the cavalry service of the British army, during Napoleon's time. After the battle of Waterloo, when the combined force of Europe, through chicanery--not valor--defeated the greatest soldier the world ever saw, the British army was cut down, rank and file--Napoleon having promised to "be a good boy," and let 'em alone in future. Among the _cut offs_, was a troop of horse, and in this troop was an old veteran Bucephalus, who had stood and made charges, smelt fire and brimstone, faced phalanxes of bayonets, and clashed rough-shod over many bloody fields, besides Waterloo,--this old fellow was turned out to grass--cashiered. When the balance of his retained companions in saddle were leaving the town where the dismemberment had taken place, the old war horse was quietly grazing in a field; the troop passed--the bugler "sounded his horn," and in less than forty winks the old old horse was up, off, over fences, and in the front ranks! The tenacity with which he clung to his place in the column caused--says the historian--the officers and men to shed tears.
So much by way of a prelude. Now for old Maguire and his horse. Some years ago, in the interior of Ohio, there did live an old Irish jintleman, who not only had a fine estate, but likewise a saw-mill, and as fine an old black mare as ever the rays of a noonday's sun lit down upon. "Bonny Doon," Maguire's old mare, was a wonderful "critter;" she opened gates, let down bars, seized the pump handle by her teeth, and actually extracted water from the barn-yard well, with all the facility of a regular double-fisted _genus homo_. As a sly old joker, she had performed various tricks, such as nipping off the tails of sucking calves, catching chickens in her manger, and making various pieces of them, and kicking in the ribs of strange dogs and horned cattle. But to the eccentric habits and bacchanalian customs of her ex-military master, the old mare's dormant talents owed their "fetching out."