“Once in a while I used to take the kid along with me when I was sellin’ things, and he always liked to go, but if it commenced to rain or turned cold I had to go back with him, and then he always got tired before night. So I didn’t take him very often. I kind of laid out to take him when she done the washin’, so he’d be out of her way, and he used to kind of like to drive, and I amused him a good deal that way. “I think mebbe I made about as much peddlin’ as I did on the railroad, but not any more, after I paid for my horse feed and the rent of the barn and gettin’ the wagon and harness fixed once in a while. Anyhow I didn’t get out of debt any faster, and the furniture men kept threatenin’ me until I went to one of them chattel-mortgage fellers and borrowed the money and mortgaged all I had and paid five dollars for makin’ out the papers and five percent a month for the money. This didn’t seem like so very much but it counts up pretty fast when you come to pay it every month. Then one day my horse up and died. I didn’t know what was the matter with him. He seemed all right at night and in the mornin’ he was dead. I didn’t know what to do at first so I went and seen the alderman. He gave me a letter to some men who run a renderin’-plant and I went out there and bought an old horse for five dollars. It was one they was goin’ to kill, and it seemed too bad to make him work any more; still I guess he’d rather work than be killed; that’s the way with people and I guess horses is about like people. I always thought that horses had about the worst time there is; they can’t never do anything they want to, they have to get up just when you tell ‘em to and be tied in a stall and eat just what you give ‘em and depend on you to bring ‘em water. Even when they’re goin’ along the road they can’t turn out for a mud hole but have to go just where you want ‘em to and never have a chance to do anything but work. “This horse wa’n’t much good but I managed to use him in my business. The boys would holler at me and ask me if I was goin’ to the bone-yard or the renderin’-plant, and once or twice one of the humane-officers stopped me and came pretty near takin’ it away and killin’ it, but nobody ever saw me abusin’ it, and I fed it all I could afford. I remember one night in the winter, about the coldest night we had, I heard it stampin’ and I couldn’t go to sleep. I knew it was stampin’ because it was so cold. We didn’t have any too much cover ourselves, but it worried me so much I got up and went out to the barn and strapped an old blanket on the horse and then came back and went to bed. I guess this was the other horse though, the one that died, for I didn’t have this last one over a winter. But I don’t know as it makes any difference which horse it was.