■88 HARE COMBINATION. 



possessor deserved to be tortured more than he was naturally 

 tortured, by the wretched feeling itself. Any experienced 

 traveller on horseback must have noticed the awe and reluctance 

 ■with which even an old horse enters a forest tract, the depressed 

 spirits with which he passes through it, and the animation he 

 recovers as soon as he can see his way out of it. 



180. — There is too, a proneness to martyrdom about some 

 horses that no one can account for, and which often subjects them 

 to fearful torture. They will jump from the mere threat or touch 

 of a whip, but will not move for a severe application of it ; they 

 will fly for the prick of a light spur, but will not move for a 

 dagger or a burn. Extremely sensitive to the slightest touch, 

 severe pain has probably some paralizing eflFect upon them. 



181. — The instructor of the young horse should bring to his 

 work great natural qualifications. He need know little of English, 

 and nothing of Latin or Greek, but he should possess all that 

 fondness for his work and that interest in each pupil, that patience 

 ■and good temper, that insight into each character, and the best 

 way to meet its peculiarities, found in the first-class instructor of 

 children, and he needs besides the highest order of courage, and a 

 certain, indefinable, mesmeric perception and influence, which 

 supplies the place of language between him and the horse, and 

 without which no man is ever very successful with them. The 

 ■courage wanted is the very opposite of the blustering aggressive- 

 ness and reckless blindness to all danger that is sometimes called 

 by that name. It is quick to see real danger, to anticipate and 

 provide for it, but when it comes it sharpens and does not drive 

 away the wits, and there must be none of that selfish fear of his 

 own skin which makes a man always so ready to secure himself at 

 any cost to others, to suspect bad intentions where none 

 •exist, and to be needlessly cruel because he cannot be calmly 

 just. Such fear is more contagious than the small pox, and 

 is quite fatal to any beneficial intercourse between man and 

 horse. Under its influence they will be perpetually alarming 

 each other, and the horse will wildly plunge from side to side at 

 an object that he would have passed quietly enough with a calmer 

 man upon his back. 



