WORLD-WIDE GLEANINGS. 133 



hovered around the old nests, but with those who have taken a 

 wider flight, and learned more both of what the world possesses 

 and of what it still needs, and have seen what ample room there 

 yet is for every willing hand and every able head. 



275. — In such new fields of enterprise the Scotchman is soon 

 persuaded to give up his venerated swing plough, the labourious 

 scythe, the slow sickle, and the back-trying shovel ; and learns to 

 rely more on the better and cheaper muscles of the horse. No 

 horses are better broken, upon the whole, than the horses of 

 Scotland ; but a colonist smiles when he reads, in a book revised 

 by a Scotchman in 1883, of the weeks, months, and years that are 

 to be devoted to the education of one horse. " As it was in the 

 beginning, is now, and ever shall be," is stamped on every page of 

 that well-meaning and more than usually accurate book. 



276. — Nor is it from his own big-headed countryman alone' 

 that a British colonist or traveller will learn something about the 

 treatment of the horse. Some of the brightest and best ideas of 

 the numerous American horse tamers have been borrowed, without 

 acknowledgement, from the red Indians. Those rope bridles that 

 are truly said to control the most vicious horse, are the exact 

 imitation of the bridles used, both in North and South America, 

 by men who have long controlled very wild horses without either 

 iron, rope, or leather ; but have made bridles, saddles, stirrups, 

 lassoes, lounging and tether lines, from raw hide, or from the 

 woods and weeds of their own territory. The wonderful eyesight 

 of even the barely human headed Australians, have taught us 

 something, and we shall show presently that by far the best and 

 most valuable lesson we have' ever learned in horsebreaking we 

 got from a half civilized native of New Zealand, whose father had 

 never seen a horse. 



SOUTH AMERICA. 



277. — South America is the country in connection with which 

 romancing travellers delight to spin their " tallest yarns" about the 

 wild horse. The nominally wild horses, in any settled part of that 

 country, are less fleet, and are not less handled, nor more wild, 

 than some of the largest herds owned in Australia. But English 



