Singapore. 145 



4 ex.'s,' must have his audience close at hand. The dismal 

 tales which I heard of companies stranded at this gate of 

 the Far East were quite enough to make me give up the 

 idea of a performance. We stayed on, however, for about 

 ten days to see the place ; to eat that most delicious of all 

 Eastern fruits, the mangosteen ; and to enjoy the congenial 

 society of Mr Harry Abrams, who keeps a large horse reposi- 

 tory at Singapore, and who, in the kindest possible manner, 

 placed all his horses at our disposal ; so we had more than 

 enough to ride and drive during our stay. Having graduated 

 in John Dawson's training stable, he is a fine horseman both 

 on the fiat and across country, and is the best man I have 

 ever seen at driving a team of ' difficult ' horses, such as, for 

 instance, four 'scrubbers' which had never had a bridle on 

 their heads before being yoked to his brake, which he gener- 

 ally succeeded in making them draw after a more or less 

 prolonged fight. Had I held a class, I could have got an 

 abundant supply of unruly subjects upon which to have 

 shown off my skill ; for Abrams's yard was full of freshly- 

 landed Western Australians, than whom there are no more 

 sulky brutes in the form of horses. They are bred promis- 

 cuously, and are ' taken up ' so late that the process of break- 

 ing seems to destroy the little scrap of 'heart' they might 

 have originally possessed. They appear to have only two 

 faults, namely, they are very hard to break, and when they 

 are broken they are no good. Tom Sayers or Jem Mace, at 

 his best, was downright slow in ' popping in the left ' com- 

 pared to one of these unhandled brutes. 



I may here explain that the vicious Australian horses 

 which I encountered in India, Ceylon, and Singapore, though 

 infinitely more difficult to reduce to obedience than any to 

 be found in the United Kingdom, had all gone through the 

 discipline of a voyage of at least a month on board ship, 

 in which they had to stand in a narrow stall, tied up to the 

 manger. The fact of their having head collars on, in no way 

 proved that they would allow themselves to be bridled or 



K 



