THEIR FEED AND THEIR FEET, 85 



Company's stables. The feed here is eight pounds of 

 hay and seventeen and a half pounds of corn and oat- 

 meal, or between seven and eight quarts, the meal 

 mixed with the cut and wet hay. These animals are, 

 to be sure, fed three times a day ; but the head man 

 acknowledged that it is impossible, under the three- 

 meal-a-day system, to avoid feeding when the animals 

 are neither heated nor soon to be put to their hard 

 work, though such avoidance would be a great ad- 

 vantage. The proposed system would solve this 

 problem. But a suggestion to that effect elicited 

 from the kind-hearted overseer the rejoinder: "A 

 horse wants feeding as often as a man ! " True 

 enough ; but here comes in the fact that hundreds of 

 thousands of men — workers, too, not drones — have, 

 for preventive or curative purposes, adopted the two- 

 meal plan, and the sufficiency of this regimen has 

 never been disproved. Many, indeed, have been 

 forced to feed themselves thus, in order to enable 

 them to continue their arduous labors. It is not 

 what any creature swallows, but what he digests and 

 assimilates, that sustains him. 



It must be remembered that the horse and the 

 man, although constituted very much alike, so far as 

 their needs are concerned, speaking with regard to 

 food, differ widely in their mental- and emotional or- 

 ganizations. One has appetite only ; the other appe- 

 tite and reason — perhaps. A horse, jogging along the 

 road, or working at the plow, will not have a mind 

 occupied with visions of a dinner " on time." He be- 

 comes thirsty, as does his driver, and at sight of water 



