METHODS OF FEEDING 365 



America. He is given his pail of water and his trough 

 full of dry or green food, or whatever else is available, so 

 soon as he stops on a journey, or else he is ridden off im- 

 mediately after. Quite as often he gets nothing at all. I 

 have seen horses ridden all day, and have camped at noon 

 with them near by a stream, without any one trying to 

 water them, because they had no bucket and the banks 

 were high. It would never occur to a Bedouin to carry a 

 skin-pail with him. But the horses seemed used to such 

 neglect, and never even whinnied for the water gurgling 

 past them. At other times I have seen horses fed at very 

 short intervals at almost every stop. This sort of thing 

 in civilized regions sounds quite foolish ; but what is one 

 horse's food is another horse's poison. 



As a rule the Arabian has a sound appetite. When it 

 fails after a hard pull, his master resorts to all kinds of 

 queer devices to make him eat. He does not rub his ears 

 and legs to restore his disturbed circulation as we would 

 do, but tweaks and twists his ears pretty roughly, and 

 cuffs him about the head; he ties knots in his forelock, 

 and pulls him about by it ; he pulls out and twists his 

 tongue, and rubs a handful of feed over it. The rationale 

 of all this is as hard to decipher as the whipping a 

 Russian horse gets if he refuses to eat. But then the 

 knout is a cure-all in Russia; there is no knout among 

 the Arabs. 



The food is much as in the rest of the Orient. Barley 

 is the bulk of the dry food ; beans, of which Cyprus 

 exports vast quantities ; oats, cut up, straw and all ; plain 

 straw cut up ; clover-hay ; green clover of the first crop. 

 Barley, fed all over the East, gives a distinctly disagreeable 

 odor to the droppings, but it is a hardy food. It is much 

 used in California. 



The Syrian horse has the same peculiarities as his broth- 



