Report upon the Exhibition of Horses at Kilhurn. 599 
which are necessary to supply food, forage, medical stores, 
boots, blankets, clothing, great-coats — to say nothing of ammu- 
nition, cartridges, and a thousand other essentials — upon a 
large scale, it will soon be found that the tough and hardy mule 
is immeasurably superior to the more delicate and sensitive 
horse. The mule will thrive and grow fat upon food which the 
horse will not touch ; and while the thin skin of the nobler beast 
is perpetually liable to be galled and subject to sore backs, the 
mule is practically as pachydermatous as the rhinoceros, and 
needs nothing but a good roll — if possible in the sand — to 
stand him in the stead of rubbing and grooming. He is not less 
indifferent to heat or cold, to rain or shine, than Sir Walter Scott's 
William of Deloraine was to " moonless midnight or matin's 
prime;" and he begins work at two years old, frequently sus- 
taining it unintermittingly, and without a day's interruption 
from sickness or lameness, until he is six or eight and twenty 
years old. Finally, when it comes (as it always does in a pro- 
longed war) to a question of killing horses or mules, in the 
absence of other food, for the support of human life, no one of 
the least experience in such matters will hesitate to give the 
preference to mule's flesh. There is a cut from the mule's jowl 
which is pronounced by Jules Gouffe to be unsurpassed in 
flavour ; and it is notorious that, during the siege of Paris, a 
selle (fane was sold inside the beleaguered city lor what Louis 
Blanc calls " a king's ransom." I have said enough to show 
that the neglect of mules by Englishmen, and especially by our 
torpid and unprogressive War Office, is one of those national 
blunders which, in Talleyrand's well-known phrase, is worse 
than a crime. The day, however, I trust, is at hand when 
the last classes in the Prize-sheets of horse-shows prepared by 
the Royal and other English Agricultural Societies will be 
filled, not by a dozen exhibits, with a couple of 20Z. first 
prizes to sustain them, but by a concours of scores upon scores 
of hybrids, ranging between sixteen and seventeen hands in 
height ; with 50/. prizes offered for their sires ; and finally, 
with experienced judges from Kentucky and California to 
pronounce that neither of those opulent and advancing States 
can boast more magnificent specimens of the mule than these 
islands are producing. 
Beport of the Judges of Mules. 
Class 53. For Agricultural and Heavy Draught Mules. — By the con- 
ditions all animals were atovo 15 hands. The winner of the first prize was a 
powerful grey of great beauty, 9 years old, and showing marks of constant 
hard work. The build combined the qualities of strength and activity in a 
