The age-herald., 1898-09-25
THE PASSING OF THE OK.
His Elimination is Attended With Con-
 siderable Pathos.

| From the Boston Transcript
 | Notwithstanding the ubiquity of the bi-
 l cycle, and the more tardy development of l the automobile, there is no evidence that
 the horse is losing ground in our social and
 | domestic economy. On the contrary, there
 has been an increase of about 40 per cent. 1 in horseflesh since 1882 and of about 12 per cent. in the number of mules, while that dear, quaint and faithful servant of man, | the patient OK, has barely held his own in | the last sixteen years This is perhaps one | of the inevitable results of the quickened l life of the country. His star is in the de- scendant. While the country may be con- graduated upon the increased push which demands greater speed and power in our
 modern activities, a sigh of regret will nevertheless follow the vanishing just as it did the old stage coach when the loco- | motive forced 1t off the road.
 The OK is such a good fellow that his
 companionship will be missed. He is the philosopher among beasts of burden He belongs by birthright to the Don't Worry Club.' He chews the cud of contentment even while he tolls, and turns upon his human companion eyes so full and soft and liquid that the great Homer used them as
 the most expressive simile occurring even to his almost infinite invention to apply to the divine Hera. So there is poetry in the fine old beast as well as philosophy. Huge and solemn, but sWeet-breathed and amia, ble, he performs his task with steady dignity that puts definite value, even if a small one, on each passing minute, and
 then ceases to burden his soul with the flight of time.
 The gradual passing away of the OK as a beast of burden has the pathos that at taches to the extinction of one of the early families. They came into the country to- gether, and together they took a pioneer part in its development. They felled and drew off the trees, they tore up the stumps,
 they scanned and melowed the rooty soil, making it richly responsive to the needs of man. They pulled out the great stones that fretted the face of nature and made garden spots of the rugged hillside and plain. The OK was factor of every enter prise. He was on the farm, at the wharf and the mill, and when in those early days of expansive and adventurous ideas the old places seemed too contracted for the set tier he bundled his family into prairie schooner, while his faithful oxen dragged the ponderous vain a six months journey toward the setting sun, accomplishing a distance which we may now be whirled be- tween the twilight and the dawn, browsing | cheerily as they wended their toilsome way along, and boarding themselves when the time for the nightly camping arrived. But the old fellow has had his day ex- cept where the conditions are still primi- tive. Once he was the steady reliance of every farmer, but now one hardly sees a yoke in the harvest field or the plough lot. His pace cannot be readjusted to the quick step of modern ideas and inventions, and utiltarianism has no use for the poetic or the picturesque. More and more his desti- nation is coming to be the shambles This makes his life shorter and we might say merrier, but merriment in an OK is incon- ceiyable