We ate our dinner from the quaint old Dutch blue bowls, and the teacups with the queer kneeling purple cows on them. Then we went to feed the horses. Roy brought us a hickory split basket filled with white corn on the cob, and wiped out a long chestnut trough which lay by the roadside. We took the bits out of the horses' mouths, leaving the headstalls on them, and they fell to with the hearty impatience of the very hungry.
I have always liked to see a horse or an ox eat his dinner. Somehow it makes the bread taste better in one's own mouth. They look so tremendously content, provokingly so I used to think when I was little, especially the ox with the yoke banging his horns. I remember how I used to fill my pockets with "nubbins" and, holding one out to old Berry or some other patriarch of the work cattle, watch how he reached for it with his rough tongue, and how surprised he was when I snatched it away and put it back in my pocket, or gave it to him, and then thrust my finger against his jaw, pushing in his cheek so that he could not eat it. He would look so wofully hurt that I laughed with glee until old Jourdan came along, gathered me up under his arm, and carried me off kicking to the kingdom of old Liza.
My early experience with the horse was not so entirely satisfactory to my youthful worship. Somewhere on my shoulder to this day are the faint marks of teeth, set there long ago on a winter morning when I was taking liberties with the table etiquette of old Charity.
We lolled in the sunshine while the horses ate, Jud on his back by the nose of the Cardinal, his fingers linked under his head. I sat on the poplar horse-block with my hands around my knee, while Ump was in the road examining El Mahdi's feet. For once he had abandoned the Bay Eagle.
He rubbed the fetlocks, felt around the top of the hoofs with his finger, scraped away the clinging dirt with the point of a knife blade, and tried the firmness of each shoe-nail. Then he lifted the horse's foot, rested it on his knee, and began to examine the shoe as an expert might examine some intricate device.
Ump held that bad shoeing was the root of all evil. "Along comes a flat-nose," he would say, "with a barefooted colt, an' a gabbin', chuckle-headed blacksmith nails shoes on its feet, an' the flat-nose jumps on an' away he goes, hipety click, an' the colt interferes, an' the flat-nose begins a kickin' an' a cursin', an' then--" Here the hunchback's fingers began to twitch. "Somebody ought to come along an' grab the fool by the scruff of his neck an' kick him till he couldn't set in a saddle, an' then go back an' boot the sole-leather off the blacksmith."