1889.] PUBLIC DOCUMENT — No. 4. 227 



(or lady) of the tail, that it is borne about without injury, 

 and may "laugh and grow fat" at its leisure. You may 

 thus often see a sheep going on foot, and its tail following 

 in a carriage. The natives will tell you that these carriage 

 tails sometimes produce seventeen okes (forty-six and three- 

 quarters pounds) of pure fat ; but the Oriental imagination 

 is prone to get the better of the real facts, and the figures 

 above given (fourteen to twenty pounds) are perhaps nearer 

 the truth. It is sufficient to know that the tails do some- 

 times become so heavy as to anchor the sheep and cause its 

 death, if suitable precautions are not taken. 



According to a recent article in the " Country Gentle- 

 man," these sheep are found in Syria, Egypt, north Africa, 

 Asia Minor and western Asia, and were described by Herod- 

 otus and Aristotle more than two thousand years ago ; but 

 the writer could not resist adding a pound or two to his tale, 

 and he claims that "animals are not rare whose tails weigh 

 from one hundred to one hundred and twenty pounds, 

 while the average weight is forty to sixty." 



Another fact is peculiar about the flocks of sheep and 

 goats. The ewes are milked as regularly as we milk our 

 cows, and it is done with wonderful rapidity. Two grasps 

 of the overflowing udder, and it is emptied. Among my 

 earliest recollections is that of a flock of goats being driven 

 every morning to my father's door and there milked, in 

 order to insure our receiving our day's supply of the lacteal 

 fluid in its virgin purity. Immense quantities of cheese, 

 made from the milk of sheep and goats, moulded into disks 

 of twelve to fourteen inches in diameter, and an inch thick, 

 are transported from the interior of the country to the mar- 

 kets of the great city. 



Of the Angora goats, with their long, fine, silky hair, 

 natives of the rocky slopes in the province of Angora, I 

 have not the heart to speak. From the silky fiber of their 

 hair, skilled workmen had long supplied the world with rare 

 and high-priced goods of female apparel. But, with the 

 priceless blessings of free trade, the country was flooded with 

 a cheap imitation made by machinery. The flocks dwindled 

 away, the occupation of whole villages was gone, and abject 

 poverty and ruin overtook the wretched inhabitants. 



