REINS, VOICE, AND WHIP. 115 



voice. I know that they love their masters and mistresses, 

 and look to them for teaching, just as dependent children 

 ask you what it is that you wish them to do. There is 

 something inexpressibly beautiful in this loving intelligence 

 on the part of animals — this sympathy between horse 

 and rider, which, in a former chapter, I strove to say 

 something about. Horses are in reality the very noblest of 

 God's created things — excepting, of course, man as he ought 

 to be. They have, so far as their endowments permit, all 

 the attributes that go to make the human character lovable 

 and good, supplemented by a rare fidelity, such as is un- 

 happily seldom met with among those who are fashioned 

 in the Creator's own image. I have read, and been told a 

 great deal, about horses that were " obstinate brutes," and 

 " wicked devils," and " outrageous beasts," and everything 

 else that was hateful and bad — and have listened with a 

 bursting and indignant heart to accounts of thrashings, and 

 starvings, and spurrings, and mouth-burnings, and other 

 wickednesses, which have made me feel how infinitely 

 superior was the so-called brute creation to that which it is 

 made to serve. I confess that it has not been my lot to 

 come across any specimens of this much-talked-of vicious 

 sort, excepting in one or two rare instances, where I knew 

 that vice had been engendered by bad and cruel treat- 

 ment. I have no doubt that horses, like human beings, are 

 sometimes born with evil natures — sometimes, but not very 

 often. I have not met with any of them, and the few with 

 whom I have ever had trouble have invariably been those 

 whom wanton cruelty or rank injustice had in the first 



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