232 HORSE-SHOES AND HORSE-SHOEING. 



hoof with a few sharp taps, the tips of the nails being 

 only simply twisted and hammered close to the face of 

 the hoof; and the Wayland smith has earned his groat. At 

 odd intervals one comes upon a group of these tinkers arm- 

 ing the hot, painful, road-worn toes of prostrate struggling 

 bullocks with a nearly semicircular plate of metal on the 

 outer margin of the hoof ; and so smartly, that the bellow- 

 ing creatures have hardly been thrown on the ground and 

 secured than they are up again, proof against the hard, 

 sun-baked roads.' ' 



Perhaps we are not making a very wide ethnological 

 jump, if we pass from this part of the Old World to the 

 Rocky Mountains of the New Continent, and note the 

 customs among the equestrian, though not horse-loving, 

 tribes of Indians in that wild region. The horse has had 

 but little influence in civilizing the many clans who have 

 become horsemen since that animal was introduced by 

 the early Spaniards, and they have done as little in 

 attempting to prevent its degeneracy in their hands. 

 Iron shoes are never worn on the hoofs, but when tra- 

 velling over rock ground, and the unfortunate animals 

 become footsore, a substitute for the metal is found in 

 what is termed ' parfleche.' This is the untanned, sun- 

 dried hide of the buffalo or elk, in which the pounded 

 flesh or ' pemmican ' made from these beasts is wrapped up 

 and preserved, and on which these people largely subsist. 

 The thick, hairy skin, I am informed, makes an excellent 

 temporary covering for the foot, forming, when tied 

 round the pastern, a convenient hoof-buskin, like that 

 made from camel's hide in the Soudan. 



' See my ' Travels on Horseback in Mantchu Tartary,' p. 399. 



