MULES FOR MILITARY SERVICE. 135 



and one day one of the smugglers, wlio had done me 

 some favours {honi soit qui mal y pense), camped with his 

 mule train in the mountains at a place where I was 

 ' nooning/ Well, Mexicans are conceded to be good 

 packers, and especially the mountain smugglers, but they 

 use a more complicated tie than this hitch, so I taught 

 it him. From that day till smuggling was put an end to 

 bv an efficient force of frontier gendarmes, he used no 

 other, and showed it to many of his confreres, the 

 consequence being that to-day it is known in the neigh- 

 bouring Mexican villages as the nudo contrabandisto/^ 



In India mule breeding for the army service has 

 attracted very great attention. It was followed in the 

 Punjab before the country came under British rule, as 

 the mule was found an indispensable animal for traffic 

 over the mountain passes in the north-west of the country. 

 Since 1876 the Government, according to the report of 

 Yet. -Lieut. -Colonel J. H. B. Hallen, C.I.E., General Super- 

 intendent Horse-breeding Operations, has fostered the 

 mule-breeding industry by giving prizes for the best mules 

 and mule-breeding stock, and by utilising the best donkey 

 sires obtainable. Colonel Hallen states that at the annual 

 fair held at Kawalpindi, from thirteen to fourteen hundred 

 mules are as a rule exhibited for sale, and that owing to 

 the employment of good sires they are improving year by 

 year. At first the natives refused to breed mules, from 

 some superstitious feeling, but finding that they fetched 

 a much larger price at the fairs than the horse stock bred 

 from their mountain ponies, they went largely into their 

 production. Colonel Hallen, in his official Memorandum 

 on mule breeding, April, 1891, reports that : 



" It may be noted that a very inferior mare, quite unfit for 

 horse breeding, i.e., only able to produce worthless and un- 



