Page:Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy, Stockton, 1872.djvu/223

Rh very much. His flesh is considered a great delicacy, which is another difference between him and the tame animal.

If any of you were by accident to get near enough to a wild Ass to observe him closely, you would be very apt to suppose him to be one of those long-eared fellows which must be beaten and stoned and punched with sticks, if you want to get them into the least bit of a trot, and which always want to stop by the roadside, if they see so much as a cabbage-leaf or a tempting thistle.

But you would find yourself greatly mistaken and astonished when, as soon as this wild creature discovered your presence, he went dashing away, bounding over the gullies and brooks, clipping it over the rocks, scudding over the plains, and disappearing in the distance like a runaway cannon-ball.

And yet if some of these fleet and spirited animals should be captured, and they and their descendants for several generations should be exposed to all sorts of privations and hardships; worked hard as soon as their spirits were broken, fed on mean food and very little of it; beaten, kicked, and abused; exposed to cold climates, to which their nature does not suit them, and treated in every way as our Jackasses are generally treated, they would soon become as slow, poky, and dull as any Donkey you ever saw.

If we have nothing else, it is very well to have a good ancestry, and no nobleman in Europe is proportionately as well descended as the Jackass.