"ARTIFICIAL" GAITS 253 



to buy a hundred to send to the Columbian Fair, and a 

 contractor offered to deliver them on board the Marseilles 

 packet at Tunis for seven hundred francs. This is barely 

 half a cent a pound, not counting the virtues. One sees 

 Arabs coming into Constantine with a donkey -load of 

 Avood, which they sell for three francs. They have come 

 twenty -five miles with it ; they sell it, and next day ride 

 the donkey back. As a meal costs them but two cents, 

 the wood nothing, and the donkey does all the work, what 

 seems a small profit for a two or three days' trip is really 

 a good one. And who is it that earns it ? 



As I have previously observed, all saddle-beasts in the 

 East go what those who would limit the horse to the Eng- 

 lish standard are pleased to call " artificial " gaits. In fact, 

 three-quarters of all the animals in the world wdiich are 

 used for riding do so. Mules broken to saddle always 

 what they call "sidle" or amble; all donkeys running- 

 walk, rack, or amble. They scarcely have to be taught. 

 Little ass-colts often rack alongside of their dams as if 

 there were no other method of progression. I have seen 

 bullocks amble or rack. Why, then, are these paces arti- 

 ficial? They are in reality natural to every member of 

 the equine race— I might say to all four-footed animals. 

 But it is chiefly in our Southern States that these gaits 

 have been studied as an art, and have been improved upon 

 and bred from. 



The donkey in Algeria is not used for riding by all 

 classes, rich and poor, as he is in Egypt and Syria. In fact, 

 he is rarely seen with a saddle. He has a pad, very simi- 

 lar to the pad on which the bespangled queens of the saw- 

 dust ring dance their short hour to delighted boys and 

 rustics, only more crude and better suited to his diminutive 

 proportions. This pad has no stirrups, and is so wide as 

 to make a seat on it extremely tiring to the uninitiated. 



