Page:Horse shoes and horse shoeing.djvu/259

Rh not quite relish the idea of parting from its worn-out shoes; and the squeamish shoer, to avoid sundry uncomfortable contusions on his shins, stands some distance off, and hammers at the end of a long thin-pointed poker, inserted between the useless plate of iron and the hoof, to twist it off. Whether aware of it or not, like the French, the Chinese seem to prefer the foot in process of shoeing being held up by an assistant, instead of courageously grasping it as our farriers do. The Tartar ponies being light-paced and small, and the roads not very stony, the shoe is light, thin, narrow, and quite ductile. It is, in fact, nothing more than a slight rim of tough iron, pierced by four nail-holes, with a separate groove for the reception of each nail-head; and the heels are drawn so thin, that when the shoe is nailed on the foot they are bent inwards to catch each angle of the inflection of the hoof, and in this way support the nails (fig. 79).

Altogether, it is far more like one of our own horse-shoes than those of the Afghans, the Arabian or Barbary, or the Persian and Turkish curiosities, and certainly very far superior to the straw sandal everywhere used in Japan to protect the horses' feet. There is little care and a great deal of dexterity exhibited in nailing on one of these iron plates. The excellent strong feet of the ponies afford every facility for a rough-and-ready job. The overgrown horn is shaved away to a level surface; a single blow makes the shoe narrower or wider without heating: it is applied to the solid crust, and one by one the unbending nails are sent through the whole thickness of the insensitive part of the