NECK COLLARS AND NECKLACES. 165 



torture, where one shilling out of the many his brutal 

 master spends in brutalising himself would remedy 

 the evil ; but, without alluding to suffering occasioned 

 by such wanton neglect and brutality, many horses 

 work to great disadvantage from mistaken notions 

 in their masters, arising from not knowing how to 

 order things better, or from a wish to be thought 

 stylish, knowing, or fashionable. A few years since 

 it became the fashion to have a collar made so light- 

 looking that the part over the withers was not wider 

 than a pair of tweezers, and the lower part under the 

 throat about the size of the coral necklaces then 

 so much the fashion with ladies. This minute 

 appendage was all right and proper on a beautiful 

 neck, any part of which it amounted to profanation 

 to hide, and which was intended and let us hope des- 

 tined to be pressed by some favoured and thrice happy 

 lover ; but its copy became a sad source of suffering 

 to the neck of an animal destined to labour in our 

 service in drawing heavy weights; yet for years 

 animals were compelled to suffer thus in gentlemen's 

 carriages, and more especially in hackney-coaches. 

 Stage coachowners were the first to get sensible col- 

 lars, and the late mania for imitating stage-coaches, 

 stage-coachmen, and stage-harness, first brought gen- 

 tlemen and others to use proper collars : thus hun- 

 dreds of the best educated and most enlightened men 

 of their age were set right by some man who pro- 

 bably had never learned his ABC, but, fortunately 

 for horses, possessed common sense. What has been 

 the result ? instead of shoulders frightful to look 

 upon, we now see hundred-and-fifty guinea horses 

 in harness during a portion of the year without a hair 

 disturbed or the vestige of a collar-mark. The present 



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