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First of all we bought some horses, three-quarter-breds and half-breds. Thorough-bred Arabs, especially mares, were too dear for our stable, and would have made us an object of suspicion. In the East, where there are official hands not clean of bribes, an Arab mare is a a favourite bribe, and I had many such offers before I had been at Damascus long; but I refused them all.
These Caribs were really half-breds, having amalgamated with the negroes. Many of the blacks own land of their own, raising arrow root, which, since the decay of the sugar industry, is the chief export. In an island only eighteen miles long by eleven broad there is not room for any distinctly marked mountain range. The whole of St.
Thoroughbred horses are never docked, whether they be used for racing, steeplechasing or hunting, and it is a monstrous thing to mutilate unfortunate half-breds, especially mares, and condemn them to be tortured by flies, and to have the most sensitive parts of their bodies turned into a safe camping ground for insects, simply because these poor animals have a stain in their pedigree.
George Moore, in his novel, Esther Waters, graphically depicts the sullen obstinacy of a low class of person who will "neither lead nor drive." I think that this dogged obstinacy of temper is rarely met with among thoroughbred, or even well-bred horses, for I have found it to exist in its worst form only among half-breds, and especially among those which have hackney blood in their veins.
It lay on the sand a little way off the greater part of the night, the shyer dogs still farther off, scarcely seen in the darkness. Perhaps these half-breds have inherited thoughts of former better days, which brings me back to that freckled, sandy-haired Eurasian boy at the Bundar, with his black eyelashes, and the blue-eyed, curly-haired girl in the native throng.
I looked round, and saw their thorough-bred mares with their lean flanks. I did not know how it would be with our half-breds; but they were in first-rate condition, full of corn and mad with spirits. So I gave Richard my usual answer to everything he said: "All right; where you lead I will follow."
And like the citizens, they hate our manner of travelling: they love to sit up and chat through half the night; and to rise before dawn is an abomination to them. At first their manners, gentle and pliable, contrast pleasantly with the roughness of the half-breds, Huwaytat and Maknawi, who have many of the demerits of the Fellah, without acquiring the merits of the Bedawi.
The stock sold from the hills are for the most part Cheviots and Blackfaces; from the low grounds half-breds, being a cross between Leicester and Cheviot and crosses between the Cheviot and Blackface. All the sales of sheep and lambs are by the "clad score" which contains twenty-one. The odd one is thrown in to meet the contingency of deaths before delivery is effected.
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