If I have liked the gray horse, it was from conviction, and not to court those who saw no safety outside the gray. But when the wisdom and the extreme intelligence of masters of science, preferring a less showy color, demonstrated to me that Perche might find an era of new glory and prosperity in changing the coat of its horse and thus enlarging the circle of consumption, I bowed meekly to their opinion. I liked the gray horse because I thought that Providence had created it gray in order that it might be able to withstand, during its work, the heat of the sun, and not be prostrated under its rays. I liked it gray, as the Arab likes his horse gray and his bournous of a whitish color; as the American planter likes his white cotton suit and his panama; as our soldier, in the field, liked, under the African or Mexican sky, the havelock which protected him against the rays of the burning luminary. I liked it gray because it seemed to me to recall more than any other the Arab, the primitive horse; because Perche having always possessed gray horses, I thought there was much more chance of finding, under this coat, the type of the country; because I had been rocked to sleep to the tune of that old ballad of our ancestors, celebrating Charles de Trie, the Percheron Seigneur, going forth to combat the English at the battle of Poitiers: “On charger white The sire of Trie Against the foe Has gone to war,” etc. etc.; because, in a word, during my infancy, I had breathed the dust of the old manuscripts making mention of the white Percheron mares. I liked it gray, because, for the service of the post-coaches and couriers, in their long stages, in the middle of the night, the gray horse appeared to me more easy to guide than the horse of a dark color. Finally, it has always seemed to me that this coat was more becoming than any other the powerful form of a vigorous worker. Does not a good-looking, stalwart, and honest peasant please you better—is he not infinitely more at ease with the Gallic blouse covering his broad shoulders, than under the dark folds of a fashionable coat, which makes him appear awkward and abashed?