sanitation laws permitted to obstruct the pathways until morning.  It need hardly be said that there was not much in the way of crusts, scraps, or bones to appease canine hunger, and the resultant keenness of the competition made the night extremely hideous.  This snarling struggle for existence had gone on night after night to the supreme annoyance of martyrs who would fain have slept, and who urged (in letters to the Editor) the wholesale destruction of the snarlers as a work at once humane, essential, and congenial.  This was in pre-horse food days, when the ox was paramount on our tables.

But now all was changed, and every dog had his day indeed!  The brutes—­not knowing the difference—­revelled in horseflesh.  The people who could not look at it gave it all to their dogs; while the most enthusiastic equine meat-eater invariably left a trifle behind him.  Canine gluttony was a source of much amusement, envy, or disgust (according to the individual temperament); and the ubiquitous cynic reminded one of a good time coming when the horse would be locally extinct and “fat dog” the daintiest of diets.  The irony of it all was that there were still at Kenilworth some hundreds of oxen, in perpetual danger of being “sniped “; and the populace argued (not unreasonably) that to force on us irrational rations was in the circumstances a callous thing.  There were doubtless considerations to palliate this procedure on the part of the Protector, but we would not see them.  The cattle were there in sufficient numbers to feed us until relief arrived.  True, relief appeared to be remote, but our view was that (if a calamity were to be averted) it must come within a month at the outside.  And what a pretty denouement it would be, we said, if, through thrusting “strange food” upon us until the Column came in, there were left a monster herd of jubilant bullocks to swell the chorus of welcome!  And, if I mistake not, they did actually swell it.  At any rate, General French was reported to have been highly indignant when informed of how much more useful than palatable the horse was, and to have ordered its exclusion from the abattoir forthwith.  We had to continue vegetating on Siege rations for two weeks after the arrival of French; but from the first moment of his entry the nightmare of horseflesh troubled us no more.

Those dark days were not without their humours withal; and there was a piquancy in the very imperviousness of our risible faculties to their correct appreciation.  Asses and mules—­it was said—­were butchered in common with horses, and discussion was wont to be rife on the relative merits of the three animals in their new sphere of usefulness.  The difficulty involved in distinguishing a steak of one from a steak of another was no small one; but donkey was reputed to taste sweeter than common horse—­a questionable recommendation!—­and the advocates of this theory were called cannibals.  The mule had its backers, too; it was the gentler animal, they