When Benham was already seventeen and, as he supposed, hardened
against his fear of beasts, his friend Prothero gave him an account
of the killing of an old labouring man by a stallion which had
escaped out of its stable. The beast had careered across a field,
leapt a hedge and come upon its victim suddenly. He had run a few
paces and stopped, trying to defend his head with the horse rearing
over him. It beat him down with two swift blows of its fore hoofs,
one, two, lifted him up in its long yellow teeth and worried him as
a terrier does a rat--the poor old wretch was still able to make a
bleating sound at that--dropped him, trampled and kicked him as he
tried to crawl away, and went on trampling and battering him until
he was no more than a bloody inhuman bundle of clothes and mire.
For more than half an hour this continued, and then its animal rage
was exhausted and it desisted, and went and grazed at a little
distance from this misshapen, hoof-marked, torn, and muddy remnant
of a man. No one it seems but a horror-stricken child knew what was
happening. . . .

This picture of human indignity tortured Benham's imagination much
more than it tortured the teller of the tale. It filled him with
shame and horror. For three or four years every detail of that
circumstantial narrative seemed unforgettable. A little lapse from
perfect health and the obsession returned. He could not endure the
neighing of horses: when he saw horses galloping in a field with him
his heart stood still. And all his life thereafter he hated horses.



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