The little horses did not know that they were owned by men; and if now and then men gave them food in the cold weather, or now and then saw to the housing of them, or now and then marked them with a mark, a short, forgotten pain, all these things they took like any other brief and passing accidents of fate. It was not man that had made their home, nor man that ordered the things they saw and used. They had not in anything about them that look which animals have when they have learned that man is of all things upon earth the fullest of sorrow, nor that which beasts have, when they have seen in man, without understanding it, what a principal poet has called “the hideous secret of his mirth”--though “hideous” is an unfair word, for the secret sorrow of man is closely allied with something Divine in his destiny. Such beasts as are continually the companions of our souls and of whom another poet has said that they are “subject and dear to man,” take from him invariably something of his foreknowledge of death. And you may see in the patient oxen of the mountains and even in the herded sheep of the Downs something of man’s burden as they take their lives along. But most you will see what price is paid by those who accompany us when you watch dogs and find that, apart from the body, they can suffer, as we can suffer, and sometimes suffer to the death. So dogs that have known men know loneliness also, and make, as men make, for distant lights at night, and are not happy without living homes. Two things only they have not, which are speech and laughter. And those animals which men deal with continually come also into an easy or an uneasy subservience to him, and you may note their hesitation where there is an unaccustomed duty, and you may note their beginnings of panic when men are not there to decide some difficult thing for them. These little horses of which I write had as yet known none of these things, and anyone who looked at them closely could see what it was that the saints meant by “innocence in Nature.” There was no evil in them at all, and the good that was in them was a simple good, of the earth and of the place in which they lived. There, away northward, it was the Downs; eastward and westward, the Forest; southward, under the sunlight, the Sea. That was all the little horses knew; and the man who in such a place and at that moment in the springtime could remember nothing more was very much more blessed than any other of his kind. But later he must remember Acheron; and what he will bear beyond Acheron--the consequence of things done. Not so the Little Horses. On Streams and Rivers