108 A VERY OLD MASTER 



for their portraits to my old master that we can't do better 

 than begin by describing him in propria persona. 



The horse family of the present day is divided, like 

 most other families, into two factions, which may be 

 described for variety's sake as those of the true horses and 

 the donkeys, these latter including also the zebras, quaggas, 

 and various other unfamiliar creatures whose names, in 

 very choice Latin, are only known to the more diligent 

 visitors at the Sunday Zoo. Now everybody must have 

 noticed that the chief broad distinction between these two 

 great groups consists in the feathering of the tail, The 

 domestic donkey, with his near congeners, the zebra and 

 co.. have smooth short-haired tails, ending in a single 

 bunch or fly-whisk of long hairs collected together in a 

 tufted bundle at the extreme tip. The horse, on the other 

 hand, besides having horny patches or callosities on both 

 fore and hind legs, while the donkeys have them on the 

 fore legs only, has a hairy tail, in which the long hairs are 

 almost equally distributed from top to bottom, thus giving 

 it its peculiarly bushy and brushy appearance. But 

 Prjevalsky's horse, as one would naturally expect from an 

 early intermediate form, stands halfway in this respect 

 between the two groups, and acts the thankless part of a 

 family mediator ; for it has most of its long tail-hairs 

 collected in a final flourish, like the donkey, but several of 

 them spring from the middle distance, as in the genuine 

 Arab, though never from the very top, thus showing an 

 approach to the true horsey habit without actually attaining 

 that final pinnacle of equine glory. So Tar as one can 

 make out from the somewhat rude handicraft of my pre- 

 historic Phidias the horse of the quaternary epoch had 

 much the same caudal peculiarity ; his tail was bushy, but 

 only in the lower half. He was still in the intermediate 

 stage between horse and donkey, a natural mule still 



