Transcriber’s Note
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. A list of correctionsis found at the end of the text.
The One Hoss Shay
With its Companion Poems
How the Old Horse Won the Bet
&
The Broomstick Train
By Oliver Wendell Holmes
With Illustrations by
Howard Pyle
Boston and New York
Houghton, Mifflin and Company
The Riverside Press, Cambridge>
M DCCC XCII
Copyright, 1858, 1877, 1886, and 1890,
By OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES.
Copyright, 1891,
By HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.
All rights reserved.
The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U.S.A.
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co.
Preface
My publishers suggested the bringing together of the three poems herepresented to the reader as being to some extent alike in their generalcharacter. “The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay” is a perfectly intelligibleconception, whatever material difficulties it presents. It isconceivable that a being of an order superior to humanity should sounderstand the conditions of matter that he could construct a machinewhich should go to pieces, if not into its constituent atoms, at a givenmoment of the future. The mind may take a certain pleasure in thispicture of the impossible. The event follows as a logical consequence ofthe presupposed condition of things.
There is a practical lesson to be got out of the story. Observation[5]shows us in what point any particular mechanism is most likely to giveway. In a wagon, for instance, the weak point is where the axle entersthe h