to own I was a little scared the day we got into the water down by Cook’s Cove, for you see I was hitched to the buggy and the lines got tangled about my legs, and there were chunks of ice and lots of driftwood floating about, and the current sucking me down; but master had got to shore and stood on the bank calling, “This way, Star, this way!” and when I heard his voice I—­well, I don’t know how I managed to do it, but I turned square round and swam upstream with the buggy behind me, and got safe and sound to land.  I’ve heard Master Fred say my back was covered with river-grass, and I trembled all over with the fright and the hard pull.

“But, dear me, all that happened long ago when master was courting old Tim Bunce’s daughter Martha, down Stony Creek Road.  How that girl did take to me!  She used to say she knew the sound of my hoofs on the road, of a still night, when we were a mile away; and she’d say over a little rhyme she’d got hold of somehow:—­

    ’Star, Star, good and bright,
    I wish you may and I wish you might
    Bring somebody to me I want to see to-night.’

“If she said that twice, looking straight down the road, she told us we were sure to come.  She was a plump rosy-cheeked girl when Master Fred brought her to be mistress here, though you mightn’t think it to see her now, what with the cooking and the dairy-work and raising a big family of children.  But if you want to know what mistress was like twenty years ago, you’ve only to look at our Ada.

“Now, there’s a girl for you, as good as she is pretty, and getting to be a woman grown; though I remember, as though it happened yesterday, her mother’s coming out one spring day to where I was nibbling grass in the door-yard, with her baby in her arms, and holding up the little thing to me, and saying, ’This is Ada, Star,—­you must be good friends with Ada,’ Friends!  I should say so.  Before that child was a year old, she used to cry to be held on my back for a ride, and when she was getting better of the scarlet fever, she kept saying, ’Me ’ant to tee ole ‘Tar,’ till, to pacify her, they led me to the open window of the room where she lay, and she reached her mite of a hand from the bed to stroke my nose and give me the lump of sugar she had saved for me under her pillow.

“Bless the child!  And it was just so with all the rest, Tim and Martha and Fred and Jenny and baby May—­there was a new baby in that house every year.  Those young ones would crawl over me, and sit on me, when I was lying down in the stable; ride me, three or four at a time, without bridle or saddle, and cling to my neck and tail when there was no room left on my back.  They shared their apples and gingerbread with me, and brought me goodies on a plate sometimes so that I might eat my dinner, they said, ‘like the rest of the folks,’ I fetched them to and from school, and trotted every day to the post-office and the Corners to do the family errands;