PEKING AND ITS NEIGHBOURHOOD. 231 



not quite relish the idea of parting from its worn-out shoes ; 

 and the squeamish shoer, to avoid sundry uncomfortable 

 contusions on his shins, stands some distance off, and 

 hammers at the end of a long thin-pointed poker, inserted 

 between the useless plate of iron and the hoof, to twist 

 it off. Whether aware of it or not, like the French, the 

 Chinese seem to prefer the foot in process of shoeing 

 being held up by an assistant, instead of courageously 

 grasping it as our farriers do. The Tartar ponies being 

 light-paced and small, and the roads not very stony, 

 the shoe is light, thin, narrow, and quite ductile. It is, 

 in fact, nothing more than a slight rim of tough iron, 

 pierced by four nail-holes, with a separate groove for the 

 reception of each nail-head ; and the heels are drawn so 

 thin, that when the shoe is nailed on the foot they are bent 

 inwards to catch each angle of the inflection of the hoof, 

 and in this way support the nails (fig. 79). Altogether, it is 

 far more like one of our own horse- 

 shoes than those of the Afghans, the 

 Arabian or Barbary, or the Persian 

 and Turkish curiosities, and certainly 

 very far superior to the straw sandal 

 ev^erywhere used in J aj)an to protect fig. 79 



the horses' feet. There is little care and a great deal of 

 dexterity exhibited in nailing on one of these iron plates. 

 The excellent strong feet of the ponies afford every facil- 

 ity for a rough-and-ready job. The overgrown horn is 

 shaved away to a level surface ; a single blow makes the 

 shoe narrower or wider without heating : it is applied to the 

 solid crust, and one by one the unbending nails are sent 

 through the whole thickness of the insensitive part of the 



