when the power is possessed, cruelty to human beings.  The ill-usage of horses, and particularly asses, is a grave and a just charge against this nation.  No other nation on earth is guilty of it to the same extent.  Not only by blows, but by privation, are we cruel towards these useful, docile, and patient creatures; and especially towards the last, which is the most docile and patient and laborious of the two, while the food that satisfies it, is of the coarsest and least costly kind, and in quantity so small!  In the habitual ill-treatment of this animal, which, in addition to all its labours, has the milk taken from its young ones to administer a remedy for our ailments, there is something that bespeaks ingratitude hardly to be described.  In a REGISTER that I wrote from Long Island, I said, that amongst all the things of which I had been bereft, I regretted no one so much as a very diminutive mare, on which my children had all, in succession, learned to ride.  She was become useless for them, and, indeed, for any other purpose; but the recollection of her was so entwined with so many past circumstances, which, at that distance, my mind conjured up, that I really was very uneasy, lest she should fall into cruel hands.  By good luck, she was, after a while, turned out on the wide world to shift for herself; and when we got back, and had a place for her to stand in, from her native forest we brought her to Kensington, and she is now at Barn-Elm, about twenty-six years old, and I dare say, as fat as a mole.  Now, not only have I no moral right (considering my ability to pay for keep) to deprive her of life; but it would be unjust and ungrateful, in me to withhold from her sufficient food and lodging to make life as pleasant as possible while that life last.

297.  In the meanwhile the book-learning crept in of its own accord, by imperceptible degrees.  Children naturally want to be like their parents, and to do what they do:  the boys following their father, and the girls their mother; and as I was always writing or reading, mine naturally desired to do something in the same way.  But, at the same time, they heard no talk from fools or drinkers; saw me with no idle, gabbling, empty companions; saw no vain and affected coxcombs, and no tawdry and extravagant women; saw no nasty gormandizing; and heard no gabble about play-houses and romances and the other nonsense that fit boys to be lobby-loungers, and girls to be the ruin of industrious and frugal young men.