the question of London and our other towns:
When we have done washing, where are we
to throw the slops?

HORSE-TAMING.

"IF your horse does not stand still, or
hesitates, then al rate him with a terrible voyce;
and beat him yourself with a good sticke
upon the head between his ears; and then
stick him in the spurring place iii or iiii
times, together, with one legge after another,
as fast as your legges might walk; your
legges must go like two bouching beetles."
Such was the maxim of an Elizabethan
horsebreaker, in the county of Norfolk. Gentler
heads and hands have been at work there since,
or that county would not rejoice in its line
of "arm-chair cobs;" with their wondrous
anchor-action (front legs straight and hind
at an angle) of seventeen miles an hour; but
his precepts have borne bitter fruits for
horses in general. Englishmen are patient
in business and in battle, but the attribute
deserts them as soon as they make centaurs of
themselves. A jockey in a race who has the
strength of mind to wait off till the severity
of the pace brings back the leading horses to
him, and will not be tempted into making
his rush till within sixty yards of the chair,
is a comparative rarity. Modern hunting
men, too, do not steal along as the old school
did; but ride at their fences at full speed,
instead of carefully steadying their horses so
as to make them go from hind leg to hind
leg; and the horsebreaker's mission seems to
extend very little beyond returning his young
charges stale and unprofitable, and with a
most suspicious aptitude for stopping at
public-houses. Even the Leicestershire
farmer who gave a man sixpence to go to
his house for the newspaper, and sat and
read it for six hours on his horse's back,
at a gate, which the animal had resolutely
refused to let him open, is a victorious but a
lonely fact in the history of that hunter-breeding
county.

None have stood so high among horsebreakers
as the celebrated rough-rider, Dick
Christian, and his style of practice did not
belie his name. There was no savage horse
that he could not handle, even when his
instructions on mounting were, that he was
to "stick to him, or else he'll worry you."
Putting on blinders, and strapping up the
near fore-leg, was the only artifice he used
till he was fairly in his saddle, and then
gentleness, fine hands, practice, and patience
did the rest. Slices of clean carrot for
occasional rewards, and bits no thicker than a
man's thumb and four inches and-a-half in
the mouth, were his principal appliances for
the colts which came to him, unruined by
modern civilisation. One great point of his
creed was, never to let the bit by any chance
get beneath the tongue, for fear it might
ruin the yet unformed mouth. On an average
during a career of more than sixty years, he
has made hunters of every temper and class,
whose aggregate price could have been little
short of four hundred thousand pounds.

The nature of horses developes itself in as
eccentric forms as that of human beings.
They conceive quite as violent likes and
dislikes; and while lions, and other animals
feræ naturæ, invariably take a fancy to the
dog, horses find friends oftener in cats and
rabbits. This probably arises from the
fur being pleasanter both to the smell and
the touch, as the nose is the crucible
through which the horse tests everything.
Their memories of persons is quite as retentive
as that of dogs. A great steeple-chaser,
whose career had brought him to work in a
plough team of ex-heroes on a fancy farm
near London, could never bear the sight
of his old jockey; and there was, some
years since, a racer at Newmarket who
would always dash out of the lot he
galloped with, and attack a horse belonging
to another trainer, the instant he
recognised him, three hundred yards off. One
took such offence at being slung for a
broken leg, that he killed his groom the
instant he was able to stand. Another would
never leave his stable unless he was blindfolded.
Georgiana had to be solemnly backed
in and backed out again of her quarters, and
even that compromise has failed to satisfy
many horses when a railway-box was in the
question. Some blood-horses, after bearing
the process all their lives, have flatly refused
to have their shoes on for three weeks at a
time; or have run wild, for nearly as long,
like noble savages in their paddocks,
forbidding all contact, and defying a whole
cohort of enemies in long-backed waistcoats
and brown gaiters.

No wonder that with all these temper
infirmities among the aristocrats of horse-flesh,
so many counties should have had their
professed whisperers, clinging to a talisman,
which villagers spoke of mysteriously as
having been gasped out by the dying father
to the son, and which the latter had refused,
year after year, even in his tipsiest moods, to
reveal. In Northumberland and Yorkshire
especially have these rough necromancers
lingered. One of them never turned from
any horse, but depended, as in fact nearly all
of them did, upon a mixture of oil of rhodium
and elicampane. By covering his hand with
it for them to smell, he made them lie down
or follow him, but the effect was seldom
lasting; and when the stimulant went off,
the patient was often a greater man-hater
than before. Not contented with their horse
triumphs such as they were, one of the brotherhood
trained two stags for a nobleman, and a
buffalo for a baronet. Another descending on
Leicestershire, taught the horses little more
than how to lie down; in which habit they
invariably indulged, both in wet and dry
spots, going or returning from cover, just as