turned to their crest-fallen owner as he passed, and suggested that he put those horses in the lumber-yard.
But not the fathers nor the brothers could give me courage. I preferred to fall into the extravagance of Bishop Soule, of whom Bishop Roberts once remarked that he heard "he had sold his horse down South, and was coming home in a stage-coach," and he regretted the degeneracy of the Church, and the passing away of its heroic epoch. But that epoch had its vices as well as its virtues, and the perils of horse-jockeying worry the Conference now in the passage of the ministers' characters far less than of yore.
I get on my star-dusted steed—silver-dusted I ought to say in this country—and he leaps, and dances, and whirls, and plays his fantastic tricks. And I pull on the curb, and that cuts and maddens and makes him more antic, for that is the purpose of the curb here.
Every thing goes by contraries. You unlock your door by turning the key to the lintel, and not away from it; you open it outward. Your boots are made so that left seems right, and right left, and look so after they are on. You take the same side in the street as your opposite, and so does he, and thus you go bowing and bobbing, neither able to get on or away. You eat your breakfast at noon, or later, and take your midday dinner about seven in the evening. So the curb, instead of steadying the horse, sets his mouth a-bleeding, and that makes him dance, which is very beautiful to riders and lookers-on. A knife thrust into his belly by the spurs, and into his mouth by the curb, gets up just the right degree of pain and madness that makes him lively and lovely.
Mine has no spur, for which all thanks. The curb is enough. He scampers up the hill, among the rocks, regardless of rider; flies down a steep rock slide, as if he would never stop; caracoles along the edge of a ravine, or barranca, five hundred to a thousand feet deep, "like he knew," as they say in my Southern country. I was "awfully scared," lest he would just shake himself when on the edgiest edge, and drop me overboard. But when we got up, and down, and up this rough lane alongside of the gorge, and the splendid
