204 Among Men and Horses. 



had made the acquaintance of Mr Oswald Brown in New- 

 market ; I diligently applied myself during our residence in 

 Calcutta to obtaining photographs for illustrating my book, 

 The Points of the Horse, with which I had long threatened 

 the reading public. Getting characteristic horses and animals 

 with the required 'points,' bad and good, is a very difficult 

 matter, especially, as exaggeration in many of such ' points ' 

 would suggest caricature, which would of course be out of 

 place in a serious work. Being on the best of terms with the 

 ' shippers,' local dealers, officers commanding cavalry regi- 

 ments and other horse owners, I was enabled to ' run my 

 eye ' over, literally, thousands of horses from which to select 

 specimens for my camera. In England, men are as chary of 

 allowing one to take such liberties with their horses, as they 

 would be with their wives ; but in India and the Colonies, 

 they are less suspicious and more obliging. As regards the 

 portraiture of animals for purposes of comparison, I had long 

 got hold of the correct idea, namely, that they should be in 

 profile. The broad Maidan or plain of Calcutta, with its 

 tropical wealth of sunshine, afforded me unsurpassed oppor- 

 tunities for photographing horses. On this level ground and 

 with a far distant horizon but little broken by trees or build- 

 ings, I could hardly help ' taking ' my subjects against the 

 sky, and having done this, once or twice, I could still less 

 resist arriving at the conclusion that a horse looks best in a 

 photograph, standing out boldly from his surroundings, when 

 thus posed. Contrary to my expectation, I found that even 

 white horses appeared to most advantage with the back- 

 ground arranged in this manner. I also learned that by 

 placing, in the centre of a plain, a horse which one wanted to 

 photograph ; the gregarious animal would instinctively look 

 out in all directions for members of his own species, and 

 would consequently hold himself prouder than if he were 

 standing close to his own stable, or at some accustomed 

 halting-place. In all these cases, I tried to obtain a photo- 

 graph of the horse and not one of his surroundings, which 



