Perhaps a few will do me the magnificent honor of absolving me from boasting, when I say that I am capable of apprehending really nice bits of information in other walks of life;—other than Boston walks. I can pick you out a pneumonia germ from under the microscope, and count your red corpuscles for you. I can receive the Continental Code by wireless, and play on a violoncello. I can get a baby to sleep.
But I cannot tell you where you are in Boston. There are people who would not admit this. They would set themselves, with their faces steadfastly toward the Hub, to learn. Geoffrey is one of these. But I have neither the time nor the proper shoes. I readily admit that Boston is too much for me at my age. So I take my brother with me. Then I placidly relegate Boston Streets to that list of things which I am constitutionally unable to learn:—how to tat, just what is a Stock, and what a Bond, and the difference between a Democrat and a Republican.
TO HORSE
“A duck,” we used to read in the primer at school, “a duck is a long low animal covered with feathers.” Similarly, a horse is a long high animal, covered with confusion. This applies to the horse as we find him in the patriotic Parade, where a brass-band precedes him, an unaccustomed rider surmounts him, and a drum-corps brings up his rear.
In our own Welcome Home Parade, after the boys returned from France, the Legion decided to double the number of its mounted effectives: all the overseas officers should ride. All the overseas officers were instantly on their feet. Their protests were loud and heated. A horse, they said, was something that they personally had never bestridden. They offered to ride anything else. They would fly down the avenue in Spads, or do the falling leaf over the arch of triumph. They would ride tanks or motor-cycles or army-trucks. But a horse was a thing of independent locomotion, not to be trifled with. It was not the idea of getting killed that they objected to, it was the looks of the thing. By “the thing,” they meant not the horse, but the rider.
In spite of the veto of the officers, the motion was carried by acclamation. The mediæval charm of a mounted horse-guard instantly kindled the community imagination. The chaplain, fresh from the navy, was promised a milk-white palfrey for his especial use, if he would wear his ice-cream suit for the occasion.
There was no time to practise before the event, but the boys were told to give themselves no anxiety about mounts. Well-bred and competent horses would appear punctually just before the time for falling in. The officers were instructed to go to a certain corner of a side street, find the fence behind the garage where the animals would be tied, select their favorite form of horse from the collection they would see there, and ride him up to the green.
When Geoffrey came home and said that he was to ride a horse in the procession, our mother, who had been a good horsewoman in her girlhood, took him aside and gave him a few quiet tips. Some horses, she said, had been trained to obey certain signals, and some to obey the exact opposite. For instance, some would go faster if you reined them in, and some would slow down. Some waited for light touches from their master's hand or foot, and others for their master's voice. You had to study your horse as an individual.
Geoffrey said that he was glad to hear any little inside gossip of this sort, and made his way alone to the place appointed, skilfully dodging friends. We gathered that if he had to have an interview with a horse, he preferred to have it with nobody looking on.