"Oh, they were all in bed," said the neighbor, and he began to laugh. That was right; my friend would have mocked at the calamity if it had been his neighbor's. "Let us go and look up your phaeton." He put his hand on the naked flank of a fine young elm, from which the bark had just been stripped. "Billy seems to have passed this way." At the foot of a stone-wall four feet high lay the phaeton, with three wheels in the air, and the fourth crushed flat against the axle; the willow back was broken, the shafts were pulled out, and Billy was gone. "Good thing there was nobody in it," said the neighbor. "Good thing it didn't run down some Irish family, and get you in for damages," said a guest. It appeared, then, that there were two good things about this disaster. My friend had not thought there were so many, but while he rejoiced in this fact, he rebelled at the notion that a sorrow like that rendered the sufferer in any event liable for damages, and he resolved that he never would have paid them. But probably he would. Some half-grown boys got the phaeton right-side up, and restored its shafts and cushions, and it limped away with them towards the carriage-house. Presently another half-grown boy came riding Billy up the hill. Billy showed an inflated nostril and an excited eye, but physically he was unharmed, save for a slight scratch on what was described as the off hind-leg; the reader may choose which leg this was. "The worst of it is," said the guest, "that you never can trust 'em after they've run off once." "Have some tea?" said the host to my friend. "No, thank you," said my friend, in whose heart the worst of it rankled; and he walked home embittered by his guilty consciousness that Billy ought never to have been left untied. But it was not this self-reproach; it was not the mutilated phaeton; it was not the loss of Billy, who must now be sold; it was the wreck of settled hopes, the renewed suspense of faith, the repetition of the tragical farce of buying another horse, that most grieved my friend.