THE ARAB MULETEER. 
241 
bargain with the muleteers. For a mule and driver the 
usual price is ten to fifteen piasters a day. On this sum the 
muleteer must feed himself and mule, and pay all his ordinary 
expenses throughout the journey. It is not much to he sure ; 
only forty or fifty cents a day for personal attendance, expenses 
on the road, and risk and interest on capital; but it seems to 
be enough, for at the end of the journey our men appeared to 
have sufficient left to keep them till the next trip. 
The Arab muleteer is a practical philosopher and man of 
the world. There is nothing to trouble him but his mule, 
and that only troubles him when it wakes him up by running 
off the road or throwing him into a ditch. He wants but 
little here below, and has a happy knack of getting that little 
almost free of expense. His mule must be fed or it will die 
in the course of time, but that want he supplies by taking the 
oats and barley out of the trough where the horses of the 
Howadji feed at night, and putting them in the place where 
his mule ought to be feeding. He does this when the drago¬ 
man is not present, because if the dragoman saw it, there 
would certainly be an unpleasant state of feeling between the 
parties. The muleteer is a man of peace ; he wishes to get 
along in the world as quietly as possible ; hence he feeds his 
mules as far as practicable at the expense of others, and says 
nothing about it, from a natural repugnance to disturbances 
of the peace. To be sure the horses of the Howadji sometimes 
look unaccountably lank and dispirited; and the mules un¬ 
accountably thriving and frisky, but what difference does 
that make to the muleteer ? If it makes any difference at all 
it is in his favor; it prolongs the journey, adds so much to 
his pay, and affords him in some degree an equivalent for the 
beatings which he daily receives from the dragoman. Besides 
what the horses lose in flesh the mules gain. Sometimes the 
dragoman swears that he gives the horses a bushel of barley 
apiece at night, and they don’t seem to be a bit the better for 
it next morning ; there must be thieves about; he determines 
to watch them, and to shoot the first man whose hand he 
sees in the horse-trough. At last the horses grow so lank and 
dejected that he does watch; he sees a hand in the barley; 
h 
