MISCELLANEA. 
121 
LOSS OP PRUSSIAN CAVALRY HORSES. 
A correspondent of the Pall Mall Gazette recently stated that 
“ for a day’s journey outside Versailles the road may be said 
to run between a succession of dead horses, skinned and left to 
rot in the fields. There is no matter for apprehension so long as 
the cold weather lasts, but the fact is suggestive of dysentery 
should a few warm days let loose the deleterious gases to 
avenge the animals worked to death. This campaign has seen the 
expenditure of enormous numbers of horses. It is said that the 
whole Prussian cavalry has been remounted more than once. 
Their present horses appear rather small and weak for their 
work.” 
SCENE IN THE STREETS OE PARIS. 
La Liberte contained a few days ago the following piquant yet 
melancholy bit of intelligence. The paragraph is headed, “What 
Becomes of a Horse that Falls,” and thus goes on : — “ Yester- 
day, at three o’clock, there passed through the Rue de Flandre, in La 
Villette, a horse, consumptive and sick, which its owner was bringing 
to the veterinary surgeon. But behold, the poor beast, unable to 
proceed further, falls upon the pavement, and cannot rise again. A 
crowd of scamps gathers, and forms a ring around the fallen horse. 
At this moment comes up a butcher, who offers to buy the dying 
horse for the Boucherie Municipale. A price is offered, a price 
taken. The horse immediately receives the coup de grace , and our 
butcher goes off for a cart. Naturally, the crowd of spectators had 
by this time grown larger than ever. The butcher had scarcely 
turned his back when the crowd, with a cheer, rushed upon the 
horse. Each wishes to have a piece. Men, women, and children 
form a melee strange in its aspect. All the instruments for cutting 
meat were employed, and in less than twenty minutes there 
remained of the horse nothing but the head and its four legs. Only 
then does the butcher arrive with his cart. We shall not attempt 
to describe his surprise and indignation. — Echo , January 6th. 
DAILY REQUIREMENTS OE HORSE-ELESH IN PARIS. 
It is affirmed that the number of horses which are daily killed in 
Paris for food amounts to no less than 650. 
The “ Besieged Resident” of the Daily News, writing from Paris 
early in December, jocularly observed : — All the animals in the 
Zoological Gardens have been killed except the monkeys : these are 
kept alive from a vague and Darwinian notion that they are our 
relatives. In the cellar of the English Embassy there are still three 
sheep. Never did the rich man lust more after the poor man’s ewe 
lamb than I lust after these sheep. I go and look at them frequently, 
much as a London Arab goes to have a smell at a cookshop. Some 
one has discovered that an excellent jelly can be made out of old 
bones, and we are called upon by the mayors to give up all our 
bones, in order that they may be submitted to the process. 
xliv. 9 
