Page:Arabia, Egypt, India - A Narrative of Travel.djvu/267

Rh sore that I can hardly chew my food. At each corner of my mouth there are sores that have been there for I don't know how long. Then—for no other reason in the world that I can see, except to torture me—they put on what is called a bearing-rein. It is made fast at one end to a thin piece of rusty iron, which goes in my mouth. My head is then pulled up, so that I can't see where I am going, and if I should happen to make a stumble I find it very difficult to recover myself; and the rein is then carried round a hook in the saddle. I believe sometimes in my struggles to ease my poor mouth, and get my head down into a more natural position, I should drag the saddle clean over my withers, only that vagabond of a driver takes care to prevent this by making the saddle fast to my tail. But oh! what I suffer from my tail!—I wish my master had one (as I am told his forefathers used to have), and that it was the fashion for Sáhibs to wear bearing-reins; he would very soon know how much better we should be without them.

But I was going to tell you about my tail. Well, it's a peculiar one, and I daresay you may have noticed it, for it is always made fast to the shaft of the shanderydan; that's to stop my wagging it, for fear I should get it over the reins. This once happened to me, and I was terribly frightened, but I did not kick or bolt; I wish to goodness I had, and smashed the trap all to pieces; for as soon as that fiend of a coachman had got the reins into his hands again, he set to and licked me most unmercifully, and the Christian gentleman, my master, sat there and looked on, and never said a word. But to return to my tail. What do you think makes me want to wriggle it about? "Why, to brush the flies off, of course," I know you'll say. No, you don't know everything. It's because my tail is covered with lice; so is my mane and forelock. And those ugly sores that you see on my hip-bones are caused by my rubbing the skin off at night while I am lying down on a bed scantily supplied with straw, and working my head and neck about to try and get some relief from the itching. Instead of my Christian master seeing that my tail and mane are dressed with carbolic acid ointment, so as to kill the animalculæ, and then kept clean, he has my tail tied to the shaft, and a little mutty (clay) dabbed on my sore hip-bones, so that they may not show. I should like to tell you what a happy home I have in the Christian gentleman's stable, and what a beautiful illustration it is of one of his pious sayings, that "Cleanliness is next to godliness," but I must reserve this for another time.—Yours, etc.,

I am trying to establish the same reformation in Egypt as