neck, and sobbed and sobbed, his face hid against the heaving side.

The old horse had looked about, expecting to see Jerome's father
coming to feed and harness him into the wood-wagon, and Jerome knew
it, and there was something about the consciousness of loss and
sorrow of this faithful dumb thing which smote him in a weaker place
than all human intelligence of it.

Abel Edwards had loved this poor animal well, and had set great store
by his faithful service; and the horse had loved him, after the dumb
fashion of his kind, and, indeed, not sensing that he was dead, loved
him still, with a love as for the living, which no human being could
compass. Jerome, clinging to this dumb beast, to which alone the love
of his father had not commenced, by those cruel and insensible
gradations, to become the memory which is the fate, as inevitable as
death itself, of all love when life is past, felt for the minute all
his new strength desert him, and relapsed into childhood and clinging
grief. "You loved him, didn't you?" he whispered between his sobs.
"You loved poor father, didn't you, Peter?" And when the horse
turned his white face and looked at him, with that grave
contemplation seemingly indicative of a higher rather than a lower
intelligence, with which an animal will often watch human emotion, he
sobbed and sobbed again, and felt his heart fail him at the
realization of his father's death, and of himself, a poor child, with
the burden of a man upon his shoulders. But it was only for a few
minutes that he yielded thus, for the stature of the mind of the boy
had in reality advanced, and soon he drew himself up to it, stopped
weeping, led the horse out to the well, drew bucket after bucket of
water, and held them patiently to his plashing lips. Then a neighbor
in the next house, a half-acre away, looking across the field, called