THEY want to give you the horn

It was the most depressing thing she'd ever seen: a sagging gray horse standing in a fenced-in field, alone, kicking, at regular intervals, with the weariest of gestures, the empty steel drum to its aft, for no other reason, clearly, plainly, obviously, than that the rusty-gong sound so produced helped fill the sun-baked hours here on Earth. It was an awful thing for a city girl to realize, that even a beast could suffer the hot whips of bone-aching boredom, and it made the universe seem an even crueler place.