Page:Three stories by Vítězslav Hálek (1886).pdf/142

 horses. Otherwise, they were more skeletons, with just a strip of horse’s hide stretched across them for the sake of appearances, and if animals, like men, were in the habit of divesting themselves of their outer garments at night, a pair of bony frameworks would have been seen taking their rest in the stables, and might have served for a sciolist to demonstrate anatomy on. Nor did the afore-mentioned horses’ hides by any means interfere with anyone who wished to compute the number of their ribs. You could do it to a hair, and see where the ribs began and where they ended, where the stomach was or rather ought to have been, where the hip bones were and similar portions, which even a painter tries to endue with a certain amount of flesh.

They were, then, bones and leather, only that even this comparison is not quite correct. Their leather was rent in many a place, particularly in the region of the ribs and hip bones where the straps frayed them; in some places it was even frayed off altogether, especially about the neck where the collar sat. At times these frayed and shabby objects tempted the fancy to divers comparisons. They looked like the seedy old sofa of some aged country parson, and only wanted a little horse hair or whatever the sofa was stuffed with to peep out from their rent hides, to make the comparison perfect. Or, again, they looked like an old sleeve of a past generation, which no longer gave any