A VERY OLD MASTER 107 



loosely demarcated, while my old French bas-relief would 

 fall into the first. To put the date quite succinctly, I 

 should say it was most likely about 244,000 years before 

 the creation of Adam according to Ussher. 



The work of the old master is lightly incised on reindeer 

 horn, and represents two horses, of a very early and heavy 

 type, following one another, with heads stretched forward, 

 as if sniffing the air suspiciously in search of enemies. 

 The horses would certainly excite unfavourable comment 

 at Newmarket. Their ' points ' are undoubtedly coarse 

 and clumsy : their heads are big, thick, stupid, and 

 ungainly ; their manes are bushy and ill-defined ; their 

 legs are distinctly feeble and spindle -shaped ; their tails 

 more closely resemble the tail of the domestic pig than 

 that of the noble animal beloved with a love passing the 

 love of women by the English aristocracy. Nevertheless 

 there is little (if any) reason to doubt that my very old 

 master did, on the whole, accurately represent the ancestral 

 steed of his own exceedingly remote period. There were 

 once horses even as is the horse of the pre -historic 

 Dordonian artist. Such clumsy, big-headed brutes, dun 

 in hue and striped down the back like modern donkeys, 

 did actually once roam over the low plains where Paris 

 now stands, and browse off lush grass and tall water-plants 

 around the quays of Bordeaux and Lyons. Not only do 

 the bones of the contemporary horses, dug up in caves, 

 prove this, but quite recently the Kussiaii traveller 

 Prjevalsky (whose name is so much easier to spell than to 

 pronounce) has discovered a similar living horse, which 

 drags on an obscure existence somewhere in the high 

 table-lands of Central Asia. Prjevalsky's horse (you see, 

 as I have only to write the word, without uttering it, I 

 don't mind how often or how intrepidly I use it) is so 

 singularly like the clumsy brutes that sat, or rather stood, 



