DIRECTED BY VOICE. 189 



teams, and the drivers permitted aad expected to ride, so that 

 they have no longer the same strong motive to make their horses 

 guide readily to the voice, and it is now a rare thing to see a team 

 guiding better to the voice than any man could guide them by 

 the reins. For all purposes, but especially for agricultural work, 

 the di-aft horse is tar more valuable that has been taught to obey 

 a few simple verbal directions. Even on the road no team can 

 be so pleasantly and completely guided by reins as by the voice, 

 but with the manure, or harvest cart, or waggon, the horse hoe, 

 and the veering plough, where the driver is not riding, and wants 

 both his hands for other purposes, much time, or an extra hand is 

 often saved, and a better result produced, when the horse's 

 attentive ear is made the only medium of directing his course. 



421. — It would, perhaps, not be correct to say that it is very 

 easy to teach this. The fact that whilst every one admits it to 

 be a most desirable accomphshment, not one horse in a hundred 

 is ever taught to do it well, must go far to show that it is 

 either not easy, that few persons know how to go to work about 

 it, or what is more like the truth, few persons are made of the 

 right stuff to succeed in the attempt. "We may very soon see 

 how to do it, or how not to do it, by carefully watching the men 

 who always succeed, and those who universally fail at it. 



■122. — Whenever you see a driver whose horses lean confi- 

 dently into the collar, however slowly they may be able to move 

 the weioht behind them, and turu to the right or to the left in 

 obedience to his voice, without tossing up their heads or altering 

 their pace, you may depend upon it that there is something about 

 that man that has eminently qualified him for dealhig with the 

 animals in his care. There is no passion in his eye ; there is no 

 agitation in his voice ; his whip is not held savagely in the palm 

 of his hand, but loosely between his fingers and his thumb, and 

 now and then dropped slowly, with half its own weight on the 

 shoulders of a horse that he surveys witli pride, whilst he calmly 

 repeats the word "comather," "comather," "comather." His 

 horses twist one ear round to listen to his unruffled voice, and 

 turn to the left without raising their heads or altering their 

 pace. 



