So the “family pet,” as Trotwood has called him, goes lame. He is taken to the shoeing shop in the belief that the shoer can relieve him. Now, this shoer is a human being, flesh and blood like other men, and it is extremely difficult for horseshoers to be strictly honest. (I speak from experience.) The fact is, he wants to tell the owner that his horse is too highly fed for the amount of exercise he is getting. He would like to tell him that high calks and dry stalls are slowly, but surely, drawing his hoofs together, causing a lateral pressure of the wall on the more sensitive internal parts, and he thinks of many other things that point to the duty of the care-taker. But I have found that, usually, that kind of talk don’t suit my customers. It puts too much of the responsibility on them, so the shoer begins at once to look wise. The horseshoer who knows how to look wise is an artist, born to succeed. Placing his thumbs in the armholes of his vest, he begins a tirade of abuse on the man who last shod the horse, after this fashion: “Well, I should think he would be lame. Any man that don’t know better than to put a pair of cook stoves like those on a horse’s foot,” etc., etc. After he has removed the “cook stoves” he proceeds to shoe the horse in his own unapproachable way polishes the shoes, rasps the hoofs carefully and, perhaps, saturates the bottoms with oil of tar. He pays the price demanded, takes the horse home and, when his lameness grows worse instead of better, he comes to the conclusion that he has been “buncoed.” A few days ago a grocer’s horse with thick-walled hoofs was brought to us, shod with heavy shoes and high calks, hoofs badly contracted, and dead lame. I promised that if given my own way, I would cure him. We shortened the hoofs, put on a pair of “tips”—just a little patch of iron on each toe, letting the frog, or what remained of it, down on the ground. In less than ten days the lameness ceased though he had been lame for many months. In winter when it is necessary to shoe him with calks again, he occasionally shows a little lameness, but when spring comes we go back to the “tips” and the trouble vanishes. The owner of this horse thinks we performed a miracle, but we did nothing of the kind, we omitted the fancy rasping, the oil of tar, and the wise look in this case, and just kept close to nature. In the days of the old horse cars in the cities I have stood on the boulder-covered streets of Chicago and watched the car horses, to see how they were shod. Imagine my surprise when I found hundreds of them shod in front, with shoes similar to those we used on the grocer’s horse.