One day, his master being away when a call came, he determined to answer it, and see if he could diagnose the case. He returned shortly after, and triumphantly told the doctor that the man was sick from eating too much horse.
"A horse, you stupid fool!" cried the irate doctor. "What do you mean?"
"Why, master, it couldn't be anything else, because I saw a saddle and stirrups under the bed."
I don't believe that Mr. Henry ever thought what a queer combination of nicknames his son would have when he named him Thomas Richard. Some called him "Tom," some "Dick," and others, instead of calling him by his last name, Henry, changed that, too, to "Harry," so he became Tom, Dick, and Harry rolled into one.
Mr. Henry was a great sportsman, and many a time had Tom listened to his father and one of his friends plan out a day's shooting. Tom had often made his little plans, only to be carried out in his dreams. But at last, one September evening, in his twelfth year, dreams could no longer satisfy him. As he sat in his father's "den" after supper, looking for the hundredth time through the book of colored sporting incidents and game-birds, taking occasional long glances at the little sixteen-bore which hung over his father's head, as he sat at his desk reading the _Forest and Stream_, Tom was really developing a plan. He must go shooting, and with a real gun of some kind. "Sling-shots" he was done with; then he knew if he asked permission, what the answer would be, and therefore he decided that his hunting-trip must be made "on the sly," and this alone was one cause for the rather restless night which followed. As he turned the pages of the big book he began to imagine himself in the place of the tall man in the picture just taking a partridge from his dog's mouth, and on the next page he was the short thick-set man in brown hunting-coat walking up to his dogs, who were "stiff" and "stanch" on a covey of quail, which in pictures you can always see hiding in the clump of bushes.
Now, Tom, Dick, and Harry had a friend, and that friend had a Flobert rifle, and on that friend's willingness to lend he was counting strongly. The game did not seem to worry him; he kept thinking of a certain patch of blackberry bushes just outside a small piece of woods, where he had often started up an old cock partridge, in fact, he knew so much about that partridge that once he crept up on him, and almost got a shot at him with the now-to-be-despised "sling-shot"; and with a Flobert--even if his father had said that no true sportsman would shoot a bird on the "sit"--he felt sure he could get him, and if he did he'd come home, own up, and trust to luck for the rest, but he was somewhat doubtful as to the reception he would meet.