l _Iliad_.

We passed few persons on that golden morning. I remember a renter riding
his plough horse in its ploughing gears; great wooden hames, broad
breeching, and rusty trace chains rattling and clanking with every
stride of the heavy horse; the renter in his patched and mud-smeared
clothes,--work-harness too. A genius might have painted him and gotten
into his picture the full measure of relentless destiny and the
abominable indifference of nature.

Still it was not the man, but the horse, that suggested the tremendous
question. One felt that somehow the man could change his station if he
tried, but the horse was a servant of servants, under man and under
nature. The broad, kindly, obedient face! It was enough to break a
body's heart to sit still and look down into it. No trace of doubt or
rebellion or complaint, only an appealing meekness as of one who tries
to do as well as he can understand. Great simple-hearted slave! How will
you answer when your master is judged by the King of Kings? How will he
explain away his brutality to you when at last One shall say to him,
"Why are these marks on the body of my servant?"

The Good Book tells us on many a page how, when we meet him, we shall
know the righteous, but nowhere does it tell more clearly than where it
says, he is merciful to his beast. In the Hills there was no surer way
to find trouble than to strike the horse of the cattle-drover. I have
seen an indolent blacksmith booted across his shop because he kicked a
horse on the leg to make him hold his foot up. And I have seen a lout's
head broken because the master caught him swearing at a horse.

As we rode, the day opened, and leaf and grass blade glistened with the
melting frost. The partridge called to his mate across the fields. The
ground squirrel, in his striped coat, hurried along the rail fence,
bobbing in and out as though he were terribly late for some important
engagement. The blackbirds in great flocks swung about above the corn
fields, man[oe]uvring like an army, and now and then a crow shouted in
his pirate tongue as he steered westward to a higher hill-top.

All the people of the earth were about their business on this October
morning. Sometimes an urchin passed us on his way to the grist mill,
astride a bag of corn, riding some ancient patriarchal horse which, out
of a wisdom of years, refused to mend his gait for all the kicking of
the urchin's naked heels. And we hailed him for a cavalier.