This catching the horse, perhaps two of them, was very good fun
usually, and would have broken the Sunday if the horse had not been
wanted for taking the family to meeting. It was so peaceful and
still in the pasture on Sunday morning; but the horses were never so
playful, the colts never so frisky. Round and round the lot the boy
went calling, in an entreating Sunday voice, "Jock, jock, jock,
jock," and shaking his salt-dish, while the horses, with heads erect,
and shaking tails and flashing heels, dashed from corner to corner,
and gave the boy a pretty good race before he could coax the nose of
one of them into his dish. The boy got angry, and came very near
saying "dum it," but he rather enjoyed the fun, after all.
The boy remembers how his mother's anxiety was divided between the
set of his turn-over collar, the parting of his hair, and his memory
of the Sunday-school verses; and what a wild confusion there was
through the house in getting off for meeting, and how he was kept
running hither and thither, to get the hymn-book, or a palm-leaf fan,
or the best whip, or to pick from the Sunday part of the garden the
bunch of caraway-seed.
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