Jupiter Ann

It was only after serious consideration that Miss Prue had bought the little horse, Jupiter, and then she changed the name at once. For a respectable spinster to drive any sort of horse was bad enough in Miss Prue’s opinion; but to drive a heathen one! To replace “Jupiter” she considered “Ann” a sensible, dignified, and proper name, and “Ann” she named him, regardless of age, sex, or “previous condition of servitude.” The villagers accepted the change--though with modifications; the horse was known thereafter as “Miss Prue’s Jupiter Ann.”

Miss Prue had said that she wanted a safe, steady horse; one that would not run, balk, or kick. She would not have bought any horse, indeed, had it not been that the way to the post office, the store, the church, and everywhere else, had grown so unaccountably long--Miss Prue was approaching her sixtieth birthday. The horse had been hers now a month, and thus far it had been everything that a dignified, somewhat timid spinster could wish it to be. Fortunately--or unfortunately, as one may choose to look at it--Miss Prue did not know that in the dim recesses of Jupiter’s memory there lurked the smell of the turf, the feel of the jockey’s coaxing touch, and the sound of a triumphant multitude shouting his name; in Miss Prue’s estimation the next deadly sin to treason and murder was horse racing.

There was no one in the town, perhaps, who did not know of Miss Prue’s abhorrence of horse racing. On all occasions she freed her mind concerning it; and there was a report that the only lover of her youth had lost his suit through his passion for driving fast horses. Even the county fair Miss Prue had refused all her life to attend--there was the horse racing. It was because of all this that she had been so loath to buy a horse, if only the way to everywhere had not grown so long!