If any of you were by accident to get near enough to a wild Ass to observe him closely, you would be very apt to suppose him to be one of those long-eared fellows which must be beaten and stoned and punched with sticks, if you want to get them into the least bit of a trot, and which always want to stop by the roadside, if they see so much as a cabbage-leaf or a tempting thistle.

But you would find yourself greatly mistaken and astonished when, as soon as this wild creature discovered your presence, he went dashing away, bounding over the gullies and brooks, clipping it over the rocks, scudding over the plains, and disappearing in the distance like a runaway cannon-ball.

And yet if some of these fleet and spirited animals should be captured, and they and their descendants for several generations should be exposed to all sorts of privations and hardships; worked hard as soon as their spirits were broken, fed on mean food and very little of it; beaten, kicked, and abused; exposed to cold climates, to which their nature does not suit them, and treated in every way as our Jackasses are generally treated, they would soon become as slow, poky, and dull as any Donkey you ever saw.

If we have nothing else, it is very well to have a good ancestry, and no nobleman in Europe is proportionately as well descended as the Jackass.

ANCIENT RIDING.

There are a great many different methods by which we can take a ride.  When we are very young we are generally very well pleased with what most boys and girls call “piggy-back” riding, and when we get older we delight in horses and carriages, and some of us even take pleasure in the motion of railroad cars.

Other methods are not so pleasant.  Persons who have tried it say that riding a Camel, a little Donkey, or a rail, is exceedingly disagreeable until you are used to it, and there are various other styles of progression which are not nearly so comfortable as walking.

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There were in ancient times contrivances for riding which are at present entirely unknown, except among half-civilized nations, and which must have been exceedingly pleasant.

When, for instance, an Egyptian Princess wished to take the air, she seated herself in a Palanquin, which was nothing but a comfortable chair, with poles at the sides, and her bearers, with the ends of the poles upon their shoulders, bore her gently and easily along, while an attendant with a threefold fan kept the sun from her face and gently fanned her as she rode.

Such a method of riding must have been very agreeable, for the shoulders of practised walkers impart to the rider a much more elastic and agreeable motion than the best made springs, and, for a well fed, lazy Princess nothing could have been more charming than to be borne thus beneath the waving palm-trees, and by the banks of the streams where the lotus blossomed at the water’s edge, and the Ibis sniffed the cooling breeze.