7. A Very Old Master - Page 2

water-plants around the quays of Bordeaux and Lyons. Not only
do the bones of the contemporary horses, dug up in caves, prove this,
but quite recently the Russian traveller Prjevalsky (whose name is so
much easier to spell than to pronounce) has discovered a similar living
horse, which drags on an obscure existence somewhere in the high
table-lands of Central Asia. Prjevalsky's horse (you see, as I have only
to write the word, without uttering it, I don't mind how often or how
intrepidly I use it) is so singularly like the clumsy brutes that sat,
or rather stood, for their portraits to my old master that we can't do
better than begin by describing him _in propria persona_.

The horse family of the present day is divided, like most other
families, into two factions, which may be described for variety's sake
as those of the true horses and the donkeys, these latter including also
the zebras, quaggas, and various other unfamiliar creatures whose names,
in very choice Latin, are only known to the more diligent visitors at
the Sunday Zoo. Now everybody must have noticed that the chief broad
distinction between these two great groups consists in the feathering of
the tail. The domestic donkey, with his near congeners, the zebra and
co., have smooth short-haired tails, ending in a single bunch or
fly-whisk of long hairs collected together in a tufted bundle at the
extreme tip. The horse, on the other hand, besides having horny patches
or callosities on both fore and hind legs, while the donkeys have them
on the fore legs only, has a hairy tail, in which the long hairs are
almost equally distributed from top to bottom, thus giving it its
peculiarly bushy and brushy appearance. But Prjevalsky's horse, as one
would naturally expect from an early intermediate form, stands half-way
in this respect between the two groups, and acts the thankless part of a
family mediator; for it has most of its long tail-hairs collected in a
final flourish, like the donkey, but several of them spring from the
middle distance, as in the genuine Arab, though never from the very top,
thus showing an approach to the true horsey habit without actually
attaining that final pinnacle of equine glory. So far as one can make
out from the somewhat rude handicraft of my prehistoric Phidias the
horse of the quaternary epoch had much the same caudal peculiarity; his
tail was bushy, but only in the lower half. He was still in the
intermediate stage between horse and donkey, a natural mule still
struggling up aspiringly toward perfect horsehood. In all other matters
the two creatures--the cave man's horse and Prjevalsky's--closely agree.
Both display large heads, thick necks, coarse manes, and a general
disregard of 'points' which would strike disgust and dismay into