The next time that Ginger and I were together in the paddock she told me
about her first place.
“After my breaking in,” she said, “I was bought by a dealer to match
another chestnut horse. For some weeks he drove us together, and then we
were sold to a fashionable gentleman, and were sent up to London. I had
been driven with a check-rein by the dealer, and I hated it worse
than anything else; but in this place we were reined far tighter, the
coachman and his master thinking we looked more stylish so. We were
often driven about in the park and other fashionable places. You who
never had a check-rein on don’t know what it is, but I can tell you it
is dreadful.
“I like to toss my head about and hold it as high as any horse; but
fancy now yourself, if you tossed your head up high and were obliged to
hold it there, and that for hours together, not able to move it at all,
except with a jerk still higher, your neck aching till you did not know
how to bear it. Besides that, to have two bits instead of one–and mine
was a sharp one, it hurt my tongue and my jaw, and the blood from my
tongue colored the froth that kept flying from my lips as I chafed and
fretted at the bits and rein. It was worst when we had to stand by the
hour waiting for our mistress at some grand party or entertainment, and
if I fretted or stamped with impatience the whip was laid on. It was
enough to drive one mad.”
“Did not your master take any thought for you?” I said.
“No,” said she, “he only cared to have a stylish turnout, as they
call it; I think he knew very little about horses; he left that to his
coachman, who told him I had an irritable temper! that I had not been
well broken to the check-rein, but I should soon get used to it; but he
was not the man to do it, for when I was in the stable, miserable and
angry, instead of being smoothed and quieted by kindness, I got only a
surly word or a blow. If he had been civil I would have tried to
bear it. I was willing to work, and ready to work hard too; but to be
tormented for nothing but their fancies angered me. What right had they
to make me suffer like that? Besides the soreness in my mouth, and
the pain in my neck, it always made my windpipe feel bad, and if I had
stopped there long I know it would have spoiled my breathing; but I grew
more and more restless and irritable, I could not help it; and I began
to snap and kick when any one came to harness me; for this the groom
beat me, and one day, as they had just buckled us into the carriage,
and were straining my head up with that rein, I began to plunge and
kick with all my might. I soon broke a lot of harness, and kicked myself
clear; so that was an end of that place.
“After this I was sent to Tattersall’s to be sold; of course I could not
be warranted free from vice, so nothing was said about that. My handsome
appearance and good paces soon brought a gentleman to bid for me, and I
was bought by another dealer; he tried me in all kinds of ways and with
different bits, and he soon found out what I could not bear. At last
he drove me quite without a check-rein, and then sold me as a perfectly
quiet horse to a gentleman in the country; he was a good master, and I
was getting on very well, but his old groom left him and a new one came.
This man was as hard-tempered and hard-handed as Samson; he always spoke
in a rough, impatient voice, and if I did not move in the stall the
moment he wanted me, he would hit me above the hocks with his stable
broom or the fork, whichever he might have in his hand. Everything he
did was rough, and I began to hate him; he wanted to make me afraid
of him, but I was too high-mettled for that, and one day when he had
aggravated me more than usual I bit him, which of course put him in a
great rage, and he began to hit me about the head with a riding whip.
After that he never dared to come into my stall again; either my heels
or my teeth were ready for him, and he knew it. I was quite quiet with
my master, but of course he listened to what the man said, and so I was
sold again.
“The same dealer heard of me, and said he thought he knew one place
where I should do well. ”Twas a pity,’ he said, ‘that such a fine horse
should go to the bad, for want of a real good chance,’ and the end of it
was that I came here not long before you did; but I had then made up my
mind that men were my natural enemies and that I must defend myself. Of
course it is very different here, but who knows how long it will last? I
wish I could think about things as you do; but I can’t, after all I have
gone through.”
“Well,” I said, “I think it would be a real shame if you were to bite or
kick John or James.”
“I don’t mean to,” she said, “while they are good to me. I did bite
James once pretty sharp, but John said, ‘Try her with kindness,’ and
instead of punishing me as I expected, James came to me with his arm
bound up, and brought me a bran mash and stroked me; and I have never
snapped at him since, and I won’t either.”
I was sorry for Ginger, but of course I knew very little then, and I
thought most likely she made the worst of it; however, I found that as
the weeks went on she grew much more gentle and cheerful, and had lost
the watchful, defiant look that she used to turn on any strange person
who came near her; and one day James said, “I do believe that mare is
getting fond of me, she quite whinnied after me this morning when I had
been rubbing her forehead.”
“Ay, ay, Jim, ’tis ‘the Birtwick balls’,” said John, “she’ll be as good
as Black Beauty by and by; kindness is all the physic she wants, poor
thing!” Master noticed the change, too, and one day when he got out of
the carriage and came to speak to us, as he often did, he stroked her
beautiful neck. “Well, my pretty one, well, how do things go with you
now? You are a good bit happier than when you came to us, I think.”
She put her nose up to him in a friendly, trustful way, while he rubbed
it gently.
“We shall make a cure of her, John,” he said.
“Yes, sir, she’s wonderfully improved; she’s not the same creature that
she was; it’s ‘the Birtwick balls’, sir,” said John, laughing.
This was a little joke of John’s; he used to say that a regular course
of “the Birtwick horseballs” would cure almost any vicious horse; these
balls, he said, were made up of patience and gentleness, firmness and
petting, one pound of each to be mixed up with half a pint of common
sense, and given to the horse every day.