The evil beast made dashes with his tethered head at
flies, threatening to twist or demolish my foot at
Each, flung his
hind legs upwards, attempted to dislodge flies on his nose with his
hind hoof, executed capers which involved a total disappearance of
everything in front of the saddle, squealed, stumbled, kicked his
old shoes off, and resented the feeble attempts which the mago made
to replace them, and finally walked in to Yokote and down its long
and dismal street mainly on his hind legs, shaking the rope out of
his timid leader's hand, and shaking me into a sort of aching
jelly! I used to think that horses were made vicious either by
being teased or by violence in breaking; but this does not account
for the malignity of the Japanese horses, for the people are so
much afraid of them that they treat them with great respect: they
are not beaten or kicked, are spoken to in soothing tones, and, on
the whole, live better than their masters. Perhaps this is the
secret of their villainy - "Jeshurun waxed fat and kicked."
Yokote, a town of 10,000 people, in which the best yadoyas are all
non-respectable, is an ill-favoured, ill-smelling, forlorn, dirty,
damp, miserable place, with a large trade in cottons. As I rode
through on my temporary biped the people rushed out from the baths
to see me, men and women alike without a particle of clothing. The
house-master was very polite, but I had a dark and dirty room, up a
bamboo ladder, and it swarmed with fleas and mosquitoes to an
exasperating extent.
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