INDIAN PONT. 79 



Tliey are very docile, apparently as intelligent as dogs, 

 good-tempered wlien not stallions, and extraordinarily high- 

 couraged. We once saw, some five-and-twenty years ago, 

 largo herds of these ponies running half wild in the great 

 meadows of the Mohawk Eeservation, on the hanks of 

 the Grand River, near Brantford, in Upper Canada; and 

 afterward travelled' many days in succession in a light 

 wagon, drawn by a pair of these little shaggy brutes not 

 much bigger than Newfoundland dogs, both thorough stal- 

 lions, hardly able to see out of their little fierce eyea 

 through their thick shag of hair; and we were singularly 

 impressed with their qualities. They were driven with 

 the least possible quantity of harness, and that chiefly 

 made of rope, without breechings, bearing-reins or blinders. 

 The driver had no whip, and said he dared not use one 

 to them if he had, but ruled them perfectly, when he chose 

 to do so, by his voice. Chiefly, however, he left them to 

 themselves, and admirably did they perform. The roads, 

 if they could be called roads, were atrocious ; often axle- 

 deep in mud ; often over corduroy tracks, made of un- 

 hewn logs, through deep, shaking morasses, full of holes 

 that would have engulfed a big horse and his rider, and, at 

 times, passing over large, deep, boggy streams and rivers, 

 on a species of bridge which we never saw before or else- 

 where, and trust we may never see again. Whenever they, 

 doubted their ground, the ponies lowered their noses, 

 snorted, snuffed at the doubtful place, and seemed to ex- 

 amine it with more than human intelligence, and always 

 in the end scrambled over the difiiculty, and brolight us 

 through or over it in safety. At the end of the trip we 

 parted with our small equine friends with real regret, and 

 never have forgotten them. This stamp of Canadian pony, 

 we think, by all odds, the best animal of the sort on this 

 continent for teaching boys to ride ; and we should feel 



