nd soft look about the hair indescribably rich and elegant. Many a time
have I heard ladies dispute the shade and hue of her plush-like coat as
they ran their white, jeweled fingers through her silken hair. Her body
was round in the barrel and perfectly symmetrical. She was wide in the
haunches, without projection of the hipbones, upon which the shorter
ribs seemed to lap. High in the withers as she was, the line of her back
and neck perfectly curved, while her deep, oblique shoulders and long,
thick forearm, ridgy with swelling sinews, suggested the perfection of
stride and power. Her knees across the pan were wide, the cannon-bone
below them short and thin; the pasterns long and sloping; her hoofs
round, dark, shiny, and well set on. Her mane was a shade darker than
her coat, fine and thin, as a thoroughbred's always is whose blood is
without taint or cross. Her ear was thin, sharply pointed, delicately
curved, nearly black around the borders, and as tremulous as the leaves
of an aspen. Her neck rose from the withers to the head in perfect
curvature, hard, devoid of fat, and well cut up under the chops. Her
nostrils were full, very full, and thin almost as parchment. The eyes,
from which tears might fall or fire flash, were well brought out, soft
as a gazelle's, almost human in their intelligence, while over the small
bony head, over neck and shoulders, yea, over the whole body and
clean down to the hoofs, the veins stood out as if the skin were but
tissue-paper against which the warm blood pressed, and which it might at
any moment burst asunder. 'A perfect animal,' I said to myself as I lay
looking her over--'an animal which might have been born from the wind
and the sunshine, so cheerful and so swift she seems; an animal which
a man would present as his choicest gift to the woman he loved, and yet
one which that woman, wife or lady-love, would give him to ride when
honor and life depended on bottom and speed.'

"All that afternoon the beautiful mare stood over me, while away to the
right of us the hoarse tide of battle flowed and ebbed. What charm, what
delusion of memory held her there? Was my face to her as the face of her
dead master, sleeping a sleep from which not even the wildest roar of
battle, no, nor her cheerful neigh at morning, would ever wake him? Or
is there in animals some instinct, answering to our intuition, only more
potent, which tells them whom to trust and whom to avoid? I know not,
and yet some