232 LICE. 
Straw yards are abominations into which no feeling man should thrust 
the horse he prizes; and no feeling man should long possess a horse 
without esteeming it. The docility is so complete, the obedience so 
entire, and the intelligence so acute, that it is hard to suppose a mortal 
possessing a creature thus endowed, without something more than a 
sheer regard for property growing up between the master and the 
servant. 
Every amiable sentiment is appealed to by the absolute trustfulness 
of the quadruped. It appears to give itself, without reservation, to the 
man who becomes its proprietor. Though gregarious in its nature, yet, 
at the owner’s will, it lives alone. It eats according to human pleasure, 
and it even grows to love the imprisonment under which it is doomed to 
exist. Cruelty cannot interfere with its content. Brutality may maim 
its body and wear out its life; but as its death approaches, it faces the 
knacker with the same trustfulness which induced it, when in its prime, 
to yield up every attribute of existence to gain the torture and abuse 
of an ungrateful world. 
Liberal food, clean lodging, soft bed, healthy exercise, and good 
grooming compose the only medicine imperative for the cure of hide- 
bound. The relief, however, may be hastened by the daily administra- 
tion of two of those tonics and alterative drinks which act so directly 
upon the skin :— 
Drink for Hide-bound. 
Liquor arsenicalis . . . . . . . . . . . Halfan ounce. 
Tincture of muriate of iron. . . . . . . «One ounce. 
WrateD. oc : tae Joe a ae ees aes ORS spint, 
Mix, and give as a dose. 
LICE. 
These parasites are the consequences natural to the states of filth and 
debility. Insects, which have been mistaken for lice, sometimes infest 
large stables and almost drive the horses frantic with the itching they 
provoke. Application after application, intended to destroy lice, is 
made use of. Every recognized source of contagion is exterminated. 
Internal as well as external medicine is resorted to, but every endeavor 
to remove the annoyance signally fails. The horses are fat and feed 
upon the best; yet they seem to breed the parasites peculiar to the 
opposite condition. At last some one points to the hen-roost which 
leans against the stable. That building is pulled down, and with it the 
nuisance disappears. 
It may to the reader appear strange that the application which killed 
lice did not destroy the insects derived from fowls. Those parasites 
