Horses. 65 



a horse quite regularly, a rich man likes to have horses at 

 his door when he wants them, but to have no trouble about 

 them at other times, using them as living velocipedes, and 

 thinking no more about them in the intervals than if they 

 were made of well-painted iron. Hence, there comes a 

 personage between the horse and his master, who feeds, 

 cleans, gently exercises the animal, and is seen and heard 

 more frequently by him in the course of one week than 

 his owner is in a month. There are the long absences of 

 the owner also, when he is staying in other people's houses, 

 or travelling, or at another residence of his where he has 

 other horses, or in his yacht where all horses whatever 

 would be much out of place. The owner, then, from the 

 horse's point of view, is a man who makes his appearance 

 from time to time armed with a whip and a pair of spurs, 

 gets upon the horse's back, compels him to trot, and gal- 

 lop, and jump hedges, and then suddenly disappears, it 

 may be for several weeks. The two lives are so widely 

 separated that there hardly can be any warm affection. 

 If the horse loves any one it is more likely to be the 

 groom than the master, but the groom has often disa- 

 greeable manners (to which horses are extremely sensi- 

 tive), and in some houses he is changed as frequently as 

 a French minister. On the whole, the horse very seldom 

 enjoys fair opportunities for attaching himself to any 

 human being. . . . 



It would be highly interesting to watch the effect of a 

 continual association between the horse and his master, and 

 still more interesting if it could be kept up during several 

 generations. The powers of affection in the horse are for 

 the most part latent. We see faint signs of them, and 

 there is a general belief that the horse has such powers, 

 which is founded partly on some exceptional examples, 



