animals which I found in his Stable was much too heroic in appearance
for me in my state of exhaustion to venture upon. Besides this, his
Roman nose and severe gravity of aspect somehow reminded me, whenever
I entered his stall, of the late Judge ----, to whose Lectures on the
Constitution I had listened in my youth, and in my then condition of
moral humiliation I felt the impropriety of putting the saddle on an
animal connected with such respectable associations. No such scruples
interfered with the use of the other animal, which was kept chiefly, I
believe, for servile purposes. He was small and mean-looking--his
foretop and mane in a hopeless tangle, with hay-seed on his eyelids,
and damp straws scattered promiscuously around his body.

Inconsiderable as this animal was, both in size and action, he was
almost too much for me, in the weak state to which I was now
reduced. This much, however, I owe him; disreputable-looking as he
was, he was still a something upon whidi my mind could rest as a point
of diversion from myself--a something outside of my own miseries. At
this time the sense of physical exhaustion had become so great that it
required an effort to perform the most common act. The business of
dressing was a serious tax upon the energies. To put on a coat, or
draw on a boot, was no light labor, and was succeeded by such a
feeling of prostration as required the morning before I could master
sufficient energy to venture upon the needed exercise. The distance to
my friend's stable was trifling. Sometimes I would find there the
negro man to whose care the horses were entrusted, but more frequently
he was absent. A feeling of humiliation at being seen by any one at a
loss how to mount a horse of so diminutive proportions, would triumph
over the sense of bodily weakness whenever he was present to bridle
and saddle him. Whenever he was not at hand the task of getting the
saddle on the pony's back was a long and arduous one. As for lifting