Their muscles harden, respiratory organs are less liable to disease, and, strange as it may sound to the uninitiated, their feet and legs do better, even when the work is on hard roads. Swelled legs, founder, azoturia, colic, and the like are more often the result of overfeeding and under exercising than the reverse.
If the feet are washed out when the horse returns to the stable—being careful to dry the legs thoroughly—and stopped at night with a sponge or bit of thick felt, these precautions, with regular exercise and judicious feeding, will do more than anything else to keep your horses in condition to go when you want them. Coachmanitis and groomaturia sometimes interfere with the owner's wish to use his horses; and where this malady is of frequent occurrence, a prolonged holiday is the only remedy.
There are some men who are constitutionally unfitted to get on with men under them. They are not necessarily bad men, but, from their golf caddy to their butlers and secretaries, they are disliked. One woman will run her house year after year without friction; another, of the bumptious variety, will supervise the whole universe, while her husband, children, and household drift, growl, and suffer. One man will step aboard a yacht, and his crew and officers will pull and haul and quarrel and leave; while another, with the same men, will have no trouble. The writer has no prescription to offer for the curing of fussy wives or bad masters. It is not to be expected that even the Almighty will create a man who shall combine the attributes of Oliver Cromwell and Heinrich Heine. But in this matter of the management of the stable there are a few rules worth keeping in mind.
Don't use your influence till you get it!
Don't worry yourself or others about trifles!
In the vital matters of honesty, sobriety, carefulness, neatness, be insistent and positive.
Don't put on airs about things of which you know less than your coachman.
Don't show your damned authority—as the Irishman with his pig—just for the pleasure of showing it!
Horses, no doubt, lived upon grasses and the like when they cared for themselves. Horses even now can do a certain amount of slow work upon hay alone, but to do this a large quantity is needed, say from eighteen pounds to twenty pounds. But by a mixture of food a horse can be made to do more and faster and more exhausting work.