354 TRAVEL, ADVENTURE, AND SPORT. 



moment not the wealth of a kingdom, not even the 

 behest of your own lady-love, would prevent you from 

 doing what you have in your mind to do. Your 

 hand, by some almost imperceptible movement, causes 

 a slackening of the rein ; your knee gently presses the 

 flank that is throbbing beneath you. For the sight 

 of the f ar - stretching plain has not been lost upon 

 your horse. His heart is thumping against the 

 saddle flap with the bounding beat of a steam-driven 

 piston. In that moment, as if some electric spark 

 had kindled your natures simultaneously, he starts 

 with a bound like a deer ; in another you are flying 

 along, urging the high-couraged animal beneath you 

 to the top of his speed, and nothing before you but 

 the wide wide desert, glistening in the morning sun, 

 whose beams meet you pleasantly enough as you rush 

 through the keen cold air of early day. But by the 

 time your gallop is over, and you are home, and long 

 before you have finished your bathing and dressing, 

 the sun's rays, so pleasant in the early morning, are 

 now pouring into the house, and heating it as furnace 

 flames heat an oven. You fly with cracking skin and 

 throbbing temples and hide yourself in the bowels of 

 the earth. Below every house are subterranean cham- 

 bers, furnished as the rooms above another house, 

 in fact a range of furnished cellars, called a "sir- 

 daub." Here you breakfast : the morning's gallop, 

 now a thing of the past, has bequeathed to you an 

 appetite before which little hills of young green cu- 



