

THE HORSE AND HIS RIDER. 175 



ing the Desert, when he finds himself unusually 

 faint and weary, he opens the jugular vein of his 

 horse, and drinks a little of the animal's blood, by 

 which he is himself refreshed, and thinks that the horse 

 too is relieved. Some of these men and horses have 

 been known to travel nine hundred miles in eleven 

 successive days. 



The Othmanlis or Ottomans, the founders of the 

 great empire that bears their name, were a branch of 

 the Turkman stock. Othman, the founder of the 

 dynasty, was the chief of a small horde, a mere 

 handful of men ; his grandson Amurath I. was he who 

 conquered Adrianople. The first conquests of the 

 Turks were achieved by freemen ; but, after the tak- 

 ing of Constantinople, a new military institution was 

 established ; and the relation between the commander 

 and his warlike servants resembled much more the 

 personal subjection of the Mamelukes to their Beys, 

 than the free allegiance owned by the bands of the 

 west to their Condottieri. The invincible army of 

 the Sultan the terrible cavalry of whom it was pro- 

 verbial, that 



where the Spahi's hoof hath trod, 

 The verdure flies the bloody sod, 



and the Janissaries, who boasted that they had never 

 fled in battle, were all slaves ; torn from their Christian 

 parents in childhood, and reared up under a system of 



