Page:Horse shoes and horse shoeing.djvu/128

104 a custom which shows that the early inhabitants of many parts of Europe were horse-loving nations, from whom the noble creature could not be separated, even by death. I allude to the interment of horses with the mighty dead, the fame of whose deeds was not allowed to pass to our time, and whose bones, fragments of weapons, or adornment, and the silent evidence of their friendship for the horse, alone remain to denote their having once upon a time existed. To a certain extent, the horse-shoes found in graves are trustworthy testimony to the antiquity of nail-shoeing, and the degree to which it prevailed.

The practice of burying the horse with his master is extremely ancient, and general to a most wonderful extent. With the Greeks, as with ourselves, horses served to heighten the solemnity of death. Homer tells us, that when the Greeks were mourning for Patroclus, and the body of that warrior being consigned to the flames, In the funeral feasts of his people, which are represented on funeral monuments, the image of a horse's head was usually placed in one corner, as an emblem that death was a journey. Among the ancient Germans, the body of the dead warrior was consumed in the flames of a particular kind of