Do not be in a hurry to accuse us of coxcombry on seeing the heading of this chapter. Horses!—a glorious word indeed for the pen of a literary man. _Musa pedestris_ (the muse goes on foot), says Horace, and all Parnassus together had but a single horse in its stable,—the well known Pegasus; and he, if we may believe Schiller’s ballad, was a beast with wings, and not at all easy to harness. We are no sportsman, alas, and we deeply regret the fact, for we are as fond of horses as though we had an income of five hundred thousand francs a year, and entirely agree with the Arabs in their contempt for people who are forced to walk. A horse is the natural pedestal for a man, and the perfect existence is that of the Centaur,—that ingenious mythological invention. However, notwithstanding that we are a simple man of letters, we once had horses. About the year 1843 or 1844, when engaged in sifting the sands of journalism through the sieve of the daily newspapers, enough golden particles appeared, to allow of the hope that, in addition to dogs, cats, and magpies, we might be able to find food for a couple of pets of larger size. At first it was a pair of Shetland ponies, about the size of a large dog, and shaggy as bears, who looked at us through their long, black manes with such friendly faces that we felt much more inclined to take them with us into the parlor than to send them to their stable. They helped themselves to sugar out of our pockets, just like trained horses. For use, however, they were entirely too small. They would have answered very well to carry an English child eight years old, or as coach horses to Tom Thumb; but, even at that date, we were blessed with the same athletic frame as now, and crowned with the same plenteous flesh which still characterizes us, and which we have been enabled to support, without giving way under its weight, for forty consecutive years. The difference in size between master and beasts was quite too apparent to the eye, though it must be said for the ponies that they made no difficulty at all about drawing their light phaeton, to which they were fastened by a tiny harness of pale fawn-colored leather, which looked as though it might have been purchased at a toy-shop.