been poisoned quite recently, just as if he had
been supping with the Borgias, and his epitaph comes in the very first
chapter of his life.)

V

MY HORSES

Now let not the reader, on seeing this title, hastily accuse me of being
a swell. Horses! That is a pretentious word to be written down by a man
of letters! _Musa pedestris_, says Horace; that is, the Muse goes on
foot, and Parnassus itself has but one horse in its stable, Pegasus.
Besides, he is a winged steed and by no means quiet in harness, if we
may credit what Schiller tells us in his ballad. I am not a sportsman,
alas! and deeply do I regret it, for I am as fond of horses as if I had
five hundred thousand a year, and I am entirely of the opinion of the
Arabs concerning pedestrians. The horse is man's natural pedestal, and
the one complete being is the centaur, whom mythology so ingeniously
invented.

Nevertheless, although I am merely a man of letters, I have owned
horses. In the year 1843 or 1844, I found in the pay-dirt of journalism,
washed out in the wooden pan of the _feuilleton_, a sufficient quantity
of gold dust to justify the hope that I might feed, besides my cats,
dogs, and magpies, a couple of animals of larger size. I first had a
couple of Shetland ponies, the size of big dogs, hairy as bears, all
mane and tail, and who looked at me in such friendly fashion through
their long black hair that I felt more like showing them into the
drawing-room than sending them to the stable. They would take sugar out
of my pockets like trained horses. But they proved to be decidedly too
small; they would have answered as saddle horses for English children
eight years of age, or as coach horses for Tom Thumb, but I was already
in the enjoyment of that athletic and portly frame for which I am famed,
and which has enabled me to bear up, without bending too much under the
burden, under forty consecutive years of supplying of copy. The
difference between the owner and the animals was unquestionably too
striking, even though the little black ponies drew at a very lively gait
the light phaeton to which they were harnessed with the daintiest tan
harness, that looked as if it had been bought in a toy shop.

Comic illustrated papers were not as numerous then as now, but there
were quite enough of them to publish caricatures of me and of my
horses. It goes without saying that, profiting by the latitude allowed
to caricature, I was represented as of elephantine