186 
A CRUSADE IN THE EAST. 
“ No / 5 said I, “ no, Yusef; this horse will do very welJ. 
He’s a little ugly, to he sure; a little broken-backed, and 
perhaps a little blind, lame, and spavined, but he has some 
extraordinary points of character. At all events, it will do 
no harm to try him. Come, away we go !” Saying which 
I undertook to vault into the saddle, but the girth being 
loose, it turned over and let me down on the other side. 
This little mishap was soon remedied, and we went off in a 
smart walk up the lane leading from Demetrie’s toward the 
sand-hills. In a short time we were well out of the labyrinth 
of hedges formed by the prickly-pears, and were going along 
very quietly and pleasantly, when all of a sudden, without 
the slightest warning, Yusef, who had a heavy stick in his 
hand, held it up in the air like a lance, and darted off furi¬ 
ously, shouting as he went, “Badra, Badra !” Had an entire 
nest of hornets simultaneously lit upon my horse Saladin, and 
stung him to the quick, he could not have shown more decided 
symptoms of sudden and violent insanity. His tail stood 
straight up, each particular hair of his mane started into life, 
his very ears seemed to be torturing themselves out of his head, 
while he snorted and pawed the earth as if perfectly convulsed 
with fury. The next instant he made a bound, which brought 
my weight upon the bridle ; and this brought Saladin upon 
his hind legs, and upon his hind legs he began to dance about 
in a circle ; and then plunged forward again in the most ex¬ 
traordinary manner. The whole proceeding was so very un¬ 
expected that I would willingly have been sitting a short 
distance off, a mere spectator ; it would have been so funny 
to see somebody else mounted upon Saladin. Both my feet 
came out of the stirrups in spite of every effort to keep 
them there ; and the bit, being contrived in some ingenious 
manner, tortured the horse’s mouth to such a degree every 
time I pulled the bridle, that he became perfectly frantic, and 
I had to let go at last and seize hold of his mane with both 
hands. This seemed to afford him immediate relief, for he 
bounded off at an amazing rate. My hat flew off at the 
same time, and the wind fairly whistled through my hair. 
I was so busy trying to hold on that I had no time to think 
