In the Stable, Field, and on the Road. 97 



often with the farm or cart horse, and you can often 

 hear them say " That will do for him — it's only a cart 

 horse," putting one in mind of the words of Tom Hood, 

 " He's only a pauper, whom nobody owns." The 

 smith does his worst for the foot of the horse with bad 

 shoes and many nails, and the groom often helps him 

 to complete the mischief, by using compounds of fat 

 and tar and other substances to dress the hoof, and 

 stopping with cow-dung to soften the feet. If I was 

 asked " Does hoof-dressing do any good ? " I should say 

 decidedly " No ;" for it stops the air-cells and prevents 

 free perspiration. Does cow-dung do any good ? It 

 enables the smith, without hard labour, to cut away 

 that block of horn on the sole, and pare the frog into a 

 nice shape, so that if the horse, in trotting over rough 

 roads and loose stones, puts its foot on a stone, it becomes 

 bruised, and may fall down and break its knees, and 

 sometimes its owner's neck. The reader may ask, do I 

 use hoof-dressing ? I tell them candidly " Yes," then 

 you may well ask why do I use it ? " Because my 

 employer likes to see it; " and with the groom as well 

 as the smith, it is often doing things to their employer's 

 whim, or losing his work. So much for the use of 

 hoplemuroma and other mixtures of its class. Now* 

 what about paring away the sole and frog? The 

 prevalent idea of old writers was that one pair of bones 

 are attached to a larger one by a yielding medium 

 substance, which by stretching admits of their descent, 

 and that another pair — the sessanoide — are suspended 

 by an elastic ligament, endowed with considerable 

 elongating properties ; that the navicular bone is pressed 



G 



