CHAPTER XXL 
THE HISTORY OF MY HORSE SALADIN. 
If there was any one thing in which I was resolved to be 
particular it was in the matter of horses. Our journey was 
to be a long one, and experience had taught me that much 
of the pleasure of traveling on horseback depends upon the 
qualities of the horse. For some reason unknown to me, and 
which I have never been able to discover even to this day, a 
sort of fatality has always attended my dealings in horseflesh. 
I had bought, hired, and borrowed the very finest-looking ani¬ 
mals that could be found any where, and never failed to find 
out before long that they w T ere blind, spavined, foundered, or 
troubled with some defect which invariably caused them to 
stumble and throw me over their heads. Not content with 
the entertaining spectacle thus afforded to public eyes, the 
very friends of my heart turned against me in the hour of 
misfortune, and said it was all my own fault; that any body 
of common sense could have foreseen the result; that the most 
honest men in the world, whose word would pass in bank for 
any amount, could not help lying when it came to horses ; 
that a man’s own father was not to be trusted in a transac¬ 
tion of this kind, or even a man’s own mother, without look¬ 
ing into the horse’s mouth and examining his hoofs. On this 
account I was resolved to study well the points of the animal 
that was to bear me through Syria. 
Yusef had already given me some slight idea of the kind 
of horse I was to have. It was an animal of the purest 
Arabian blood, descended in a direct line from the famous 
steed of the desert Ashrik ; its great-grand-dam was the beau¬ 
tiful Boo-boo-la, for whose death the renowned Arab chieftain 
