Observe, for instance, a farmer’s mule, or a poor man’s mule working in the city.  These persons, with rare exceptions, feed their mules very little grain, and they are generally in low flesh.  And yet they last a very long time, notwithstanding the rough treatment they get.  When you feed a mule, you must adjust the proportions of his body to the strength of his limbs and the kind of service he is required to perform.  Experience has taught me, that the less you feed a mule below what he will eat clean, just that amount of value and life is kept out of him.

In relation to feeding animals.  Some persons boast of having horses and mules that eat but little, and are therefore easily kept.  Now, when I want to get a horse or a mule, these small eaters are the last ones I would think of purchasing.  In nine cases out of ten, you will find such animals out of condition.  When I find animals in the Government’s possession, that cannot eat the amount necessary to sustain them and give them proper strength, I invariably throw them out, to be nursed until they will eat their rations.  Animals, to be kept in good condition, and fit for proper service, should eat their ten and twelve quarts of grain per head per day, with hay in proportion—­say, twelve pounds.

I wish here again to correct a popular error, that the mule does not eat, and requires much less food than the horse.  My experience has been, that a mule, twelve hands high, and weighing eight hundred pounds, will eat and, indeed, requires just as much as a horse of similar dimensions.  Give them similar work, keep then in a stable, or camp them out during the winter months, and the mule will eat more than the horse will or can.  A mule, however, will eat almost any thing rather than starve.  Straw, pine boards, the bark of trees, grain sacks, pieces of old leather, do not come amiss with him when he is hungry.  There were many instances, during the late war, where a team of mules were found, of a morning, standing over the remains of what had, the evening before, been a Government wagon.  When two or more have been kept tied to a wagon, they have been known to eat each other’s tail off to the bone, And yet the animal, thus deprived of his caudal appendage, did not evince much pain.

In the South, many of the plantations are worked with mules, driven by negroes.  The mule seems to understand and appreciate the negro; and the negro has a sort of fellow-feeling for the mule.  Both are sluggish and stubborn, and yet they get along well together.  The mule, too, is well suited to plantation labor, and will outlast a horse at it.  The soil is also light and sandy, and better suited to the mule’s feet.  A negro has not much sympathy for a work-horse, and in a short time will ruin him with abuse, whereas he will share his corn with the mule.  Nor does the working of the soil on southern plantations overtax the power of the mule.