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| Oats for six. |
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other, lying down, tumbling over, and biting each other, until perhaps all six would be an apparently confused heap of mule.
If the driver appeared at such a crisis with his black “ear-trumpet,” one second was long enough to dissolve the pile into its original mule atoms, and arrange them again on either side of the pole, looking as orderly and innocent as if on inspection.
An educated mule-driver was, in his little sphere, as competent a disciplinarian as the colonel of a regiment.
Nor
did he always secure the prompt and exact obedience above described by applications of the Black Snake alone, or even when accompanied by the sternest objurgations delivered in the mule dialect.
He was a terror to his subjects in yet another way: and old soldiers will sustain me in the assertion that the propulsive power of the mule-driver was increased many fold by the almost unlimited stock of profanity with which he greeted the sensitive ears of his muleship when the latter was stubborn.
I have seen mules, but now most obdurate, jump into their collars the next moment
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