Such clumsy, big-headed brutes, dun in hue
and striped down the back like modern donkeys, did actually once roam
over the low plains where Paris now stands, and browse off lush grass
and tall water-plants around the quays of Bordeaux and Lyons. Not only
do the bones of the contemporary horses, dug up in caves, prove this,
but quite recently the Russian traveller Prjevalsky (whose name is so
much easier to spell than to pronounce) has discovered a similar living
horse, which drags on an obscure existence somewhere in the high
table-lands of Central Asia. Prjevalsky's horse (you see, as I have only
to write the word, without uttering it, I don't mind how often or how
intrepidly I use it) is so singularly like the clumsy brutes that sat,
or rather stood, for their portraits to my old master that we can't do
better than begin by describing him _in propria persona_.
The horse family of the present day is divided, like most other
families, into two factions, which may be described for variety's sake
as those of the true horses and the donkeys, these latter including also
the zebras, quaggas, and various other unfamiliar creatures whose names,
in very choice Latin, are only known to the more diligent visitors at
the Sunday Zoo. Now everybody must have noticed that the chief broad
distinction between these two great groups consists in the feathering of
the tail. The domestic donkey, with his near congeners, the zebra and
co., have smooth short-haired tails, ending in a single bunch or
fly-whisk of long hairs collected together in a tufted bundle at the
extreme tip.
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