Under such inauspicious guidance and control, the army Mule, luckily pachydermatous, proceeds to the theater of his sanguinary exploits. The rich girl is often in danger of falsifying her accounts by crediting to her personality the charms of her cash. But the cashless, unsusceptible Mule stands in no peril of such baleful self-deception. Lowest in rank of created beings assigned a part in the drama, fame held to him no prismatic rewards for excess of zeal.
He was not built for a general range of cynosure business; homeliness was his heritage from the day he was foaled. He was unpoetic as a miss receiving her beau in the parlor with her two younger brothers sitting in the seat of the scornful hard by. He was unartistic as a Montana hurricane kite—an iron shutter with a tail made of log-chains. He was unsymmetric as a court dwarf with scythe-snath spine and a dome on his shoulder. Hence for the splendid immortality of sculpture he was ludicrously inapt. And if painting deigned to give him grudged space it was ever in the burlesque of cartoonage or the dim littleness of background.
His lucky half-brother, the showy, exaggerated horse, in all classes, from the pampered ex-trotter with his slim neck and his record, to the bloated muldoon of the belt-line, jaded but defiant, was an easy victor in the suit Neigh versus Bray. To him might come sweet visions of promotion in the life that is and artistic apotheosis in a glad hereafter. But to the speechless, unapproachable Mule, with periodical reactions in the hind leg, and hight merely "nigh" or "off" in the vernacular, promotion never came. Cogitating to himself with soulful grunts, he could only talk through his head-stall.
Even the sutler's horse, intoed, sway-backed and wheezy, who had habitually worn a ragged calfskin over his rump as he stood on frosty nights before the war, tied to a rail fence while his owner talked politics in the village grocery, claimed superiority. The picturesque talisman U. S. upon his shoulder was the only badge of honor permitted to the Army Mule, save when the whip-lash had cut out a slice of his skin as a souvenir. But even this significant lettering was often so inexpertly executed as to serve no decorative purpose whatever. It was infinitely less effective than a bran mash to poultice his internal pains, or a roached mane to command external admiration. With one foot over the trace and both eyes blinking, the last state of that Mule was worse than the first. To him all alleged or attempted adornments were superfluous and unsatisfying.
Here then was the sine of an arc which did not recognize equality in the cosine of its supplement. The sorriest horse, though just released from the duty of transporting miscellaneous triturations of real estate in a dumpcart, with his alimentary system painfully void of toothsome internal decoration, outranked the smoothest, softest Mule, whether young or aged, black or sorrel, dun or gray. Nevertheless the explanation of the fact that a rat-tailed cat-hammed Mule weighing five hundred and thirty pounds, saw-backed, sharktoothed, and knobby with protruding bones from throat-latch to crupper, could draw heavier loads than a round robust Norman-Percheron horse weighing a ton, remains to this day unknown, unguessable. Invidious comparison is gross violation of consanguinity equal to marrying one's widow's sister. The checked, banged and bitted high steppers of Fairmount park, dear to the heart of placid quakers because their nerves can endure the strain of "Curfew Shall Not Toll Tonight," or equivalent atrocities, will not be involved therein; their pinked tennis-tan harness, silver trimmed, with monograms at the joints and red stitches in the tug, constitute a perpetual, effectual bar. There was one glory of horse and another glory of mule, but no mule differed from another mule in glory, by any palpable percentage. They had little regard for the affinity of a somewhat common maternity. But whether rearing, plunging, kicking, rolling in the mire or pawing at the clouds, they were all equal. They met upon the level and parted on the square.
The war-horse of the late unpleasantness has been chiseled and painted in many attitudes—especially that of unsupported suspension in the atmosphere, with extended nose and carefully adjusted legs. Sheridan's horse, propelled down the wild, disheveled turnpike by "a terrible oath" at the rate of five (5) miles per stanza, hangs to the canvas in a posture unnatural as that of some artillery steed swung by the breeching from a tree after a caisson explosion. The war-horse has been sufficiently pictured and carved. But he still lacks his literary limner. Almost the sole description of him now accessible is that left by the versatile Orpheus C. Kerr. There is embodied an analysis of that celebrated Gothic steed presented to this Orpheus by his maiden aunt and endeared to the saline affections of the mackerel brigade by several amiable idiosyncrasies. Of whom it is written:
"The beast is fourteen hands high, fourteen hands long, and his sagacious head is shaped like an old-fashioned pickax. Viewed from the rear his style of architecture is Gothic, and has a gable end to which his tail is attached. His eyes are two pearls set in mahogany, and before he lost his sight were said to be brilliant." And more to the same effect, intimating a diet of shoe pegs for oats and saw-dust for millstuffs, save in the rare occasions when he could set his inflexible teeth into a hay bale with unadulterated joy.
Now, shall such of our children's children as through poverty or other crime may be debarred admission to war cycloramas be condemned to surfeit their hunger for knowledge as to the conflict's equestrian features with job lots of descriptive pinxit like this? Is the war charger to be cut off thus with no extra allowance for training or pedigree? Are nice distinctions of gait, between the singlefoot trot and the rack, which are manifestly matters of original brain power and painful culture, modified of course by heredity, to be studiously ignored? In short, is the horse to be thus dismissed into obliquity, so to speak? If so, what conclusions will posterity deduce as to the anatomical development of the speechless inferior Mule? If an animal of fair social position and tenacious of his rank is to be thus lightly disposed of, what can we claim for one of no rank whatever, with only the snap of his teeth and the whisk of his tail to attract attention? The case is critical.
When the kicker in politics dies he stays dead a long time; when an opportunity passes it may never recur. Opportunities for writing correct history are slipping by month after month, year after year. The aged, surviving Mule gets nervous as in the teething period of his suffering colthood, while our expert historians move off toward the horizon, clothed in linen ulsters and vain regrets. We have essays galore on the immorality of trotting and the iniquity of pools. We have treatises enough on overhead check reins and the cruelty of the cable slot. But this is a condition, not a theory, which now reproaches us. Soon it will be too late. If the agitation started here shall finally result in loosening some corset strings of prejudice and fixing the neglected, necessary Mule in his true orbit, all will be well. The opportunities of a grateful country for upholstering his stomach with the finest and greenest her pastures proffer, will soon be gone forever. If we can now succeed in calculating his right ascension and declination, and stamping him on the chart indelibly, we may pass from recreation to refreshment in full assurance of a duty well performed.
Then let us agitate! The winner of the sinful and expensive Derby must not forever flaunt his exclusive title to consideration. The piebald circus favorite shall no longer monopolize the fondness of our rising youth. The praiseworthy Mule, hot and foamy perhaps, stung with gad-flies, thirsty, dusty and cross, but patriotic and persevering amid all, shall have his long delayed due.