ess sense than a sheep; as
long-necked and homely a piece of perfect stupidity as there is in the
caravan, and looks it. I shall have attained the topmast round of a
species of high treason when I mention a doubt as to whether that noble
slave, the horse, is entitled to his general reputation, but such a
doubt I have. There are those who lose a good deal of money on him, and
will forgive him anything, even to the occasional breaking of their
necks. He has his admirers in a majority of mankind, yet there never
actually lived that fabled creature, a "safe" horse.

To revert again, and finally, to our national emblem, his mode of life
gives him, if we may fall into the vernacular, dead away. He may have
his virtues from our standpoint, and one of them is that he is not
prolific. His crude nest is such a one as a boy might build in rough
imitation of a nest, and call it an eagle's. Made of big sticks and
nothing else, and added to as the years pass, it is wedged into the
forks of a solitary hemlock, as high as possible from the ground and as
remote as possible from any other thing, or is perched upon the shelf of
the cliff above the canyon or the coast. It contains only three or four
homely eggs. He seems faithful in his domestic relations, and pairs off
not for a season, but for life or good behavior. This one fact covers
his good qualities, for there is undoubtedly a spice of the heroic about
it. With all his rapacious and predatory power of wing it may not be
doubted that he is a bug-eater and a lizard-catcher, and that on mesa or
in valley he fights with the raven and the buzzard for the possession of
the uppermost eye of the casual dead mule. But his especial, weakness is
an article of diet that he has no right to in the animal code, for the
reason that he can't catch it. That is fish, and he invariably simply
steals it when he gets it. Any man who has witnessed this proceeding and
not been outraged by it could hardly be considered a competent juryman
in a Chicago boodle case. The osprey, having caught his lawful fish by
pure skill and natural capacity, bears it away wriggling in his talons.
He is weighted by his booty and flies heavily. Somebody who has been
sulkily watching him for perhaps a day or two from some unseen nook,
sails after him and pounces upon him from above. Turning to fight he
must drop his fish, which the other gets and goes off with. One can but
see the disappointed fisherman return again to his watc