on the next.

When I reached home, Polly said she had found nothing in the way of a
general housework girl for the country. She had seen nine women who
wished to do all other kinds of work, but none to fit her wants.

"What do they come for if they don't want the place we described? Do
they expect we are to change our plans of life to suit their personal
notions?" she asked.

"It's hard to say what they came for or what they want. Their ways are
past finding out. We will put in another 'ad.' and perhaps have better
luck."

Wednesday, the 7th, I went to see the new team. I found a pair of
flea-bitten gray Flemish mares, weighing about twenty-eight hundred
pounds. They were four years old, short of leg and long of body, and
looked fit. The surgeon passed them sound, and said he considered them
well worth the price asked,--$300. I was pleased with the team, and
remembered a remark I had heard as a boy from an itinerant Methodist
minister at a time when the itinerant minister was supposed to know all
there was to know about horse-flesh. This was his remark: "There was
never a flea-bitten mare that was a poor horse." In spite of its
ambiguity, the saying made an impression from which I never recovered. I
always expected great things from flea-bitten grays.

The team, wagon, harness, etc., added $395 to the debit account against
the farm. Polly secured her girl,--a green German who had not been long
enough in America to despise the country.