Where Silence Is Eloquent 



means nothing without a will or communicating 

 impulse behind it. When the spirit of a horse is 

 once broken (and most of them are broken rather 

 than trained by our methods) almost anybody can 

 manage him, the blind as well as the seeing; but 

 when a horse keeps the spirit of his wild ancestors, 

 their timidity, their flightiness, their hair-trigger 

 tendency to shy or to bolt, then I envy the man 

 who can cross the gulf of ages and put something 

 of his own steadiness into the nervous brute. 



This steadying process seems to be wholly a 

 matter of spirit, so far as I have observed it, and 

 whatever passes from man to brute passes directly, 

 without need of audible speech. For example, a 

 friend of mine, a very quiet man of few words, 

 once brought home a magnificent "blooded" 

 horse which he had bought for a song because 

 "nobody could handle him." The horse was not 

 vicious in any way, but seemed to have a crazy 

 impulse to run himself to death an impulse so 

 strong that even now, when he is past twenty 

 years old, he cannot be turned loose for a moment 

 in a farm pasture. He had never been driven save 

 with a powerful curb ; even so, he would drag the 

 carriage along by the reins, and an hour of such 

 driving left a strong man's arms half paralyzed 

 by the strain. Yet at the first trial his new owner 

 put a soft rubber bit in his mouth, flipped the lines 



[I43l 



