Page:The Smart Set (Volume 1).djvu/147

WHEN my forelegs went so completely that I came down five days in succession on Murray Hill, trying to hold back my share of a heavy, overcrowded 'bus without a break, and broke my knees all to pieces on the slippery asphalt, the stage company promptly sold me for a few dollars to an old ash-man. His daughter, a very pretty little girl, was one of that drove of high kicking, bucking fillies that prance in and show off their different paces at the Opera, stripped of their stable clothes—though why such broken-gaited creatures, with their stocked ankles, are allowed in the show ring I cannot imagine. The man who buys the horses for the Opera stage seemed such a great friend of hers that she got him to take me off her father's hands for a cracking big price. The old man got so drunk on the strength of it that he nearly clubbed and kicked the life out of me before they took me away.

I thought I knew all about stages, but shied with surprise when I found the Opera stage was not a new line of 'buses, but a big wooden platform, for all the world like a coach-house floor without the washstand. It is open in front and looks out on rows and rows of mangers, and back of them little box stalls, built in stories one over the other, just big enough for donkeys or Shetland ponies. Instead, these are kept filled with women who have lost or forgotten their stable hoods and try to cover themselves with bhits of shiny brass forehead-bands and glass curb-chains around their necks, with bunches of flowers in their head-stalls and breast-plates. Why they do not catch pleuro-pneumonia in the draughts I cannot imagine.

I don't dislike my present place, although it is all night-work except for Saturday afternoons. My work is light and the feed good, but I hate the continual glare and noise. If the band played like that on Fifth avenue and the people yelled so loud they would all be run in by the police. I wish I could understand what the whole row is about, but when they keep changing me from the near to the off side, without any apparent reason, saddling or harnessing me with such a lot of different kinds of harness and useless trappings, I can't possibly get the hang of the thing. They give me different riders or drivers every night, sometimes men, sometimes women, who never have the same liveries or stable clothing, which often is nothing but a light linen sheet in zero weather. Besides, they wear such a variety of queer contrivances on their heads to keep off the flies that I am completely puzzled.

There is a thing called "Carmen," where they make ten of us horses go around and around like a circus ring. I have to gallop in ahead of them, ridden by a regular tailor, dead stuck on himself, dressed in a suit of black velvet and brandishing a tremendous gold stable key. I don't see why he keeps spurring me all the time when he wants me to go very slow, and always reins me tight back on a heavy curb bit, unless it's because he's just trying to keep in the saddle. He rolls like a sailor, and is bound to come a bad cropper on his head some night if he doesn't stop bowing to the audience and is not more careful about