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Updated: June 23, 2025
I was mounted on a most unmanageable, untrained beast, and before the work was over he was in a lather from nose to tail, and I was encased in mud from the spur to the chrome-yellowed button on the top of my forage cap. It was the custom, after having unsaddled one's mount, to pass a hasty oil-rag over bit and bridoon and stirrups, and then to fall to upon the grooming of the horse.
He is in doubt as to the advisability of grooming. He passed to the improvements preparing for the coming journey the nose bags, picketing lines, and rugs. He proposes to bandage the legs of all ponies. Finally he dealt with the difficult subjects of snow blindness and soft surfaces: for the first he suggested dyeing the forelocks, which have now grown quite long.
At the end of each monotonous, wearisome day he jogged stiffly to the uninviting stables, where he was roughly ushered into a dark, damp stall. To another horse, unused to anything better, the life would not have seemed hard. Of oats and hay there were fair quantities, and there was more or less hasty grooming.
The dell was alone in the yellow sunlight which poured over the slope from the west; and I went musing on till getting to the corner of the stables I saw Darry just round the corner grooming a black horse. He was working energetically and humming to himself as he worked a refrain which I learned afterwards to know well. "All I could make out was, I'm going home" several times repeated.
My impressions of the next ten days are of grooming, feeding, and exercising in the cool twilight of dawn, sweltering dusty drills, often in sand-storms, under a blazing mid-day sun, of "fatigues" of all sorts, when we harnessed ourselves in teams to things, or made and un-made mountains of ammunition boxes a constant round of sultry work, tempered by cool bathes on white sand, grapes from peripatetic baskets, and brief intervals of languid leisure, with al fresco meals of bully-beef and dry bread outside our tents.
From his long voyage, cramped quarters, and unavoidable lack of grooming, he was rather a disappointment to me, but I soon got over all that. As I grew older, and was able to ride and appreciate him, he became the joy and pride of my life. I was taught to ride on him by Jim Connally, the faithful Irish servant of my father, who had been with him in Mexico.
These were the facts: Natan had been grooming the horses, Nimrod and Buster, when suddenly and soundlessly there appeared before the window in the stables' rear, the misshapen head and shoulders of typo Ferdinand Bernal. He was mounted on a snow-white horse and seemed to the superstitious stable boy to have risen out of the ground.
This smart appearance was the more remarkable because, at this time it was not something on which the French army could pride itself, being almost entirely made up of volunteers not used to wearing uniform and very careless of their grooming.
There were two superb hygeens duly equipped for my wife and myself: they were snow-white, without speck or blemish, and as clean and silk-like as good grooming could accomplish. One of these beautiful creatures I subsequently measured, seven feet three and a half inches to the top of the hump; this was much above the average.
Kathryn liked the novelist; he was such an unctuous, eager little man, so redolent of the elements that went into his careful grooming. She even tried in vain to read his novels; but they proved too much for her.
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