so,” and “Luff–hard down to starboard!” and never once lost his presence
of mind or betrayed the least anxiety by voice or manner. When we came
to anchor at last, and Captain Phillips looked at his watch and said,
“Sixteen minutes–I told you it was in her! that’s over three miles an
hour!” I could see he felt entitled to a compliment, and so I said I had
never seen lightning go like that horse. And I never had.
The landlord of the American said the party had been gone nearly an hour,
but that he could give me my choice of several horses that could overtake
them. I said, never mind–I preferred a safe horse to a fast one–I
would like to have an excessively gentle horse–a horse with no spirit
whatever–a lame one, if he had such a thing. Inside of five minutes I
was mounted, and perfectly satisfied with my outfit. I had no time to
label him “This is a horse,” and so if the public took him for a sheep I
cannot help it. I was satisfied, and that was the main thing. I could
see that he had as many fine points as any man’s horse, and so I hung my
hat on one of them, behind the saddle, and swabbed the perspiration from
my face and started. I named him after this island, “Oahu” (pronounced
O-waw-hee). The first gate he came to he started in; I had neither whip
nor spur, and so I simply argued the case with him. He resisted
argument, but ultimately yielded to insult and abuse. He backed out of
that gate and steered for another one on the other side of the street.
I triumphed by my former process. Within the next six hundred yards he
crossed the street fourteen times and attempted thirteen gates, and in
the meantime the tropical sun was beating down and threatening to cave
the top of my head in, and I was literally dripping with perspiration.
He abandoned the gate business after that and went along peaceably
enough, but absorbed in meditation. I noticed this latter circumstance,
and it soon began to fill me with apprehension. I said to my self, this
creature is planning some new outrage, some fresh deviltry or other–no
horse ever thought over a subject so profoundly as this one is doing just
for nothing. The more this thing preyed upon my mind the more uneasy I
became, until the suspense became almost unbearable and I dismounted to
see if there was anything wild in his eye–for I had heard that the eye
of this noblest of our domestic animals is very expressive.
I cannot describe what a load of anxiety was lifted from my mind when I
found that he was only asleep. I woke him up and started him into a
faster walk, and then the villainy of his nature came out again. He
tried to climb over a stone wall, five or six feet high. I saw that I
must apply force to this horse, and that I might as well begin first as
last. I plucked a stout switch from a tamarind tree, and the moment he
saw it, he surrendered. He broke into a convulsive sort of a canter,
which had three short steps in it and one long one, and reminded me
alternately of the clattering shake of the great earthquake, and the
sweeping plunging of the Ajax in a storm.
And now there can be no fitter occasion than the present to pronounce a
left-handed blessing upon the man who invented the American saddle.
There is no seat to speak of about it–one might as well sit in a shovel-
-and the stirrups are nothing but an ornamental nuisance. If I were to
write down here all the abuse I expended on those stirrups, it would make
a large book, even without pictures. Sometimes I got one foot so far
through, that the stirrup partook of the nature of an anklet; sometimes
both feet were through, and I was handcuffed by the legs; and sometimes
my feet got clear out and left the stirrups wildly dangling about my
shins. Even when I was in proper position and carefully balanced upon