The donkey is really a useful and valuable animal, which might be introduced into America with great advantage to our farmers. I know of no animal of its size so tough and strong. It is astonishing, as well as shocking, to see what loads he is made to draw here. The vehicle to which he is usually harnessed is a heavy, solid affair, frequently as large as our common horse-carts. He is put to all kinds of work, and is almost exclusively the poor man’s beast of burden and travel. In cities and large towns, his cart is loaded with the infinitely-varied wares of street trade; with cabbages, fish, fruit, or with some of the thousand-and-one nicknacks that find a market among the masses of the common people. At watering-places, or on the “commons” or suburban playgrounds of large towns, he is brought out in a handsome saddle, or a well got-up little carriage, and let by the hour or by the ride to invalid adults, or to children bubbling over with life. Here, although the everlasting club, to which he is born, is wielded by his driver, he often looks comfortable and sleek, and sometimes wears a red ribbon at each ear. It would not pay to bring on to the ground the scrawny, bony creature that generally tugs in the costermonger’s cart. It is in the coal region or trade that you meet with him and his driver in their worst apostacy from all that is seemly in man or beast. To watch the poor creature, begrimed with coal-dust, wriggling up a long, steep hill, with a load four times his own weight, griping with his little sheep-footed hoofs into the black, slimy pavement of the road, while his tall, sooty-faced and harsh-voiced master, perhaps sitting on the top or on a shaft, is punching and beating him; to see this is enough to stir up the old adam in the meekest Christian to emotions of pugilistic indignation. It has often cost me a doubtful and protracted effort to keep it down. Indeed, I have often yielded to it so far as to wish that once more the poor creature might be honored of God with His gift to Balaam’s ass, and be able to speak, bolt outright, an indignant remonstrance, in human speech, against such treatment. It would serve them right!—these lineal descendants of Balaam, who have inherited his club and wield it more cruelly.
A word or two more about this animal, and I will pass on to others of more dignity of position. He is the cheapest as well as smallest beast of burden to be found in Christendom. You may buy one here for twenty or thirty English shillings. I am confident that they would be extremely serviceable in America, if once introduced. It costs but very little to keep them, and they will do all kinds of work up to the draught of 600 or 800 lbs. You frequently see here a span of them trotting off in a cart, with brisk and even step. Sometimes they are put on as leaders to a team of horses. I once saw on my walk a heavy Lincolnshire horse in the shafts, a pony next, and a donkey at the head, making a team graduated from 18 hands to 6 in height; and all pulling evenly, and apparently keeping step with each other, notwithstanding the disparity in the length of their legs.
It would be unjust to that goodwill to man and beast which is being organised and stimulated in England through an infinite number of societies, if I should omit to state that, at last, a little rill of this benevolence has reached the donkey. That most valuable and widely-circulated penny magazine, “The British Workman,” and its little companion for British workmen’s children, “The Band of Hope Review,” have advocated the rights and better treatment of this humble domestic for several years. His cause has also been pleaded in a packet of little papers called “Leaflets of the Law of Kindness for the Children.” And now, at last, a wealthy and benevolent champion, on whom the mantle of Elizabeth Fry, his aunt, has fallen, has taken the lead in the work of raising the useful creature to the level of the other animals of the pasture, stable, and barn-yard. Up to the present time, every creature that walks on four or two legs, either haired, woolled, or feathered, with the single exception of the donkey has had the door of the Agricultural Exhibition thrown wide open to it, to enter the lists for prizes or “honorable mention,” and for general admiration. A pig, whose legs and eyes have all been absorbed out of sight by an immense rotundity of fat, is often decked with a ribbon, of the Order of the Garter genus, as a reward of merit, or of grace of form and proportions! Turkeys, geese, ducks, and hens of different breeds, strut or waddle off with similar distinctions. As for blood-horses, bulls, cows, and sheep, one not versed in such matters might be tempted to think that men, especially the poorer sort, were made for beasts, and not beasts for men. And yet, mirabile dictu! at these great social gatherings of man-and-animal kind, there has not been even “a negro-pew” for the donkey. A genuine, raw, Guinea negro might have as well entered the Prince of Wales’ Ball in New York bare-footed, and offered to play a voluntary on his banjo for the dancers, as this despised quadruped have hoped to obtain the entree to these grand and fashionable assemblies of the shorter-eared elite of society.
But this prejudice against color and long ears is now going the way of other barbarisms. The gentleman to whom I have referred, a Member of Parliament, whose means are as large as his benevolence, has taken the first and decisive step towards raising the donkey to his true place in society. He has offered a liberal prize for the best conditioned one exhibited at the next Agricultural Fair. Since this offer was made, a very decided improvement has been noticed among the donkeys of the London costermongers, as if the competition for the first prize was to be a very large one.
It will be a kind of St. Crispin’s Day to the whole of the long-eared race—a day of emancipation from forty centuries of obloquy and oppression. Doubtless they will be admitted hereafter to the Royal Agricultural Society’s exhibitions, to compete for honors with animals that have hitherto spurned such association with contempt.
CHAPTER VI.
HOSPITALITIES OF “FRIENDS”—HARVEST ASPECTS—ENGLISH COUNTRY INNS; THEIR APPEARANCE, NAMES, AND DISTINCTIVE CHARACTERISTICS—THE LANDLADY, WAITER, CHAMBERMAID, AND BOOTS—EXTRA FEES AND EXTRA COMFORTS.
I reached Saffron Walden at 4 p.m., notwithstanding my involuntary walk of six extra miles in the morning. Here I remained over the Sabbath, again enjoying the hospitality of a Friend. And perhaps I may say it here and now with as much propriety as at any other time and place, that few persons, outside the pale of that society, have more frequently or fully enjoyed that hospitality than myself. This pleasant experience has covered the space of more than sixteen years. During this period, with the exception of short intervals, I have been occupied with movements which the Friends in England have always regarded with especial sympathy. This connection has brought me into acquaintance with members of the society in almost every town in Great Britain in which they reside; and in more than a hundred of their homes I have been received as a guest with a kindness which will make to my life’s end one of its sunniest memories.
On the following Monday, I resumed my walk northward, after a carriage ride which a Friend kindly gave me for a few miles on the way. Passed through a pre-eminently grain-producing district. Apparently full three-fourths of the land were covered with wheat, barley, oats, and beans. The fields of each were larger than I had noticed before; some containing 100 acres. The coming harvest is putting forth the full glory of its golden promise. The weather is all a farmer could wish, beautiful, warm, and bright. Nature, in every feature of its various scapes, seems to smile with the joy of that human happiness which her ministries inspire. Here, in these still expanses, waving with luxuriant crops, apparently so thinly peopled, one, forgetting the immense populations crowded into city spaces, is almost tempted to ask, where are all the mouths to eat this wide sea of food for man and beast, softening so gently into a yellow sheen under the very rim of the distant horizon? But, in the great heart of London, beating with the wants of millions, he will be likely to reverse the question, and ask, where can one buy bread wherewith to feed this great multitude?
At Sawston, a rustic little village on the southern border of Cambridgeshire, I entered upon the enjoyment of English country-inn life with that relish which no one born in a foreign land can so fully feel as an American. As one looks upon the living face of some distinguished celebrity for the first time, after having had his portrait hung up in the parlor for twenty years, so an American looks, for the first time, at that great and picturesque speciality among human institutions, the village inn of old England. The like of it he never saw in his own country