As I walked on, I pondered on the many other instances in which the whip is an instrument of terror or tyranny. First, I thought of the Russian bride meekly offering a horsewhip to her lord, as the token of her submission to the infliction of his blows, whenever it might suit his temper to bestow such proofs of tenderness upon her, and of the perpetual system of flagellation, which, as we are told by travellers, is exercised in the dominions of the great autocrat upon wives, children, servants, and cattle. I thought of French postilions--flagellators of the first order, at least as far as "cracking" without intermission testifies; and, finally, of the British horse-racer. Horses high in mettle, ardent in the course, without a stimulus of any kind, struggle neck and neck for victory; they approach the winning post; one jockey flogs more powerfully than his compeers; the agonized horse, in his fearful efforts, is lifted as it were from the ground, by two or three desperate twinings (the stabbing at the sides is but a variety of the torture) of the cutting whalebone round his flanks; and at the critical instant, making a bound, as it were, to escape from his half-flayed skin, throws his head forward in his effort, half a yard beyond that of his rival, who has had his share of torture too, and is declared the winner--of what?--a gold-handled prize-whip, which is borne away in triumph by the owner of the winning horse! To be sure, he pockets some of that which is so truly designated "the root of all evil;" but the acquisition of the whip is the distinguishing honour. And how does this whip in reality differ from any of the "whips for a penny?" It is of pure gold and whalebone; the others are but of painted stick and the cheapest leather; yet they are both but _playthings_--the one in the hand of a man who has spent, it may be, half his patrimony, and as much of his time in the endeavour to win it, while he attaches no real or intrinsic value to it afterwards; the other in the hand of the child, to whom it appears a real and substantial prize. The jockey-man is not a whit more rational in this respect than the boy who bestrides his hobby-horse, and flourishes his penny whip. Then succeeded to my imagination a far more brutal scene, the steeple-chase. A horse is overpowered in a deep and heavy fallow; he is flogged to press him through it; he reaches a break-neck wall; a desperate cut of the whip sends him flying over it; again and again he puts forth his strength and speed, and falls, and rises again at the instigation of the whip. He comes to a brook; it is too wide for his failing powers, and there is a rotten and precipitous bank at the other side; he shudders, and recoils a moment, but a tremendous lash, worse than the dread of drowning, and the goading of the spur, force him in desperation to the leap; his hind feet give way at the landing side; he falls backward; his spine is broken, and at length a pistol bullet ends his miseries.