Horseflesh and Horsepower

There was a period when the horse was man's noble friend and ally, when he was cared for

The Black-Bottom Bustard of Central Syncopatia.

even as the “flying five” and the “epileptic eight” are to-day. In tropical climates he even wore a straw bonnet. To-day he functions beneath a metal bonnet and is called horsepower. Ay, verily, the noble quadruped has been potted, page 12 tinned and canned to serve man's lust for lubricated locomotion.

The mental association of horses and holidays takes me back twenty years along the track of time, to the days—before horsepower superseded horse flesh—of the coach and five-horse team. The journey—from Waitara to Awakino—was an Odyssey through one of the most beautiful parts of New Zealand, over a mountain billowing with greenery, across a writhing band of quicksilver which revealed itself as a river, along a twisting road bounded in many places by lofty ramparts of split and rifted papa and splashed by the bright green of young flax and topped by overhanging fern-palms and foliage, which, to the uplifted gaze, conveyed the impression of a hanging forest. We skirted the brinks of cliffs, where, below, the Tasman rollers pounded at the rocks and retreated with long troughs, creamy with swaying lacework. To-day, the motor crashes over this road, but it is a poor vehicle from which to assimilate the glory of Nature. I must admit that the coach-horses of twenty years ago were hardly models of equine perfection; they were for the most part, hammerheaded, razor - backed, ribby prads but they certainly caused the road to recede beneath their hocks in commendable fashion. Their steady gait suggested that they had been wound up, like mechanical toys, before the journey.

Defied the Laws of Gravity along the Edge.