stable cost seven or eight thousand dollars to build, and people with
that much money to invest in such comforts were classified as the
Rich. They paid the inhabitant of "the girl's room" two dollars a
week, and, in the latter part of this period, two dollars and a half,
and finally three dollars a week. She was Irish, ordinarily, or
German or it might be Scandinavian, but never native to the land
unless she happened to be a person of colour. The man or youth who
lived in the stable had like wages, and sometimes he, too, was lately
a steerage voyager, but much oftener he was coloured.

After sunrise, on pleasant mornings, the alleys behind the stables
were gay; laughter and shouting went up and down their dusty lengths,
with a lively accompaniment of curry-combs knocking against back
fences and stable walls, for the darkies loved to curry their horses
in the alley. Darkies always prefer to gossip in shouts instead of
whispers; and they feel that profanity, unless it be vociferous, is
almost worthless. Horrible phrases were caught by early rising
children and carried to older people for definition, sometimes at
inopportune moments; while less investigative children would often
merely repeat the phrases in some subsequent flurry of agitation, and
yet bring about consequences so emphatic as to be recalled with ease
in middle life.

They have passed, those darky hired-men of the Midland town; and the
introspective horses they curried and brushed and whacked and amiably
cursed--those good old horses switch their tails at flies no more.
For all their seeming permanence they might as well have been
buffaloes--or the buffalo laprobes that grew bald in patches and used
to slide from the careless drivers' knees and hang unconcerned, half
way to the ground. The stables have been transformed into other