The Elephant Keeper. Christopher Nicholson

then, you should say so.’

      ‘Yes, my Lord,’ I said.

      Again I stopped, unable to express the full extent of my reservations, except in my burning face.

      ‘You know, Tom, so long as what you write is accurate and free from Invention—so long as it is faithful to the Truth—you cannot go far wrong,’ he told me.

      ‘Yes, my Lord.’

      Having returned me the page, which I took very unwillingly, he went on: ‘By the by, Tom, though this is a small matter—with respect to style, there is no great need to employ capital letters quite so freely as you have done. In the past, I know, it was thought correct to lavish them on every possible occasion; but the fashion has changed, as fashions do.’

      ‘I will not use them at all, my Lord.’

      ‘No, no,’ said he, smiling, ‘you should use them for proper names, and at the beginning of sentences, and also, perhaps, if you wish to shew the importance of some thing or other—then they are valuable, and indeed necessary. For the rest, they may be left aside. But it is a small matter, scarcely worth mentioning.’

      ‘May I use a capital for the Elephant, my Lord?’

      ‘Why—if you wish. After all, she is the subject of the History, is she not, and therefore very important. However, perhaps I should not have mentioned it. The simple Truth should be your aim, Tom. Fix yourself on that, and you will have no great difficulty.’

      ‘Yes, my Lord.’

      I find that I have therefore agreed again to try again, that is to strive, to attempt, to endeavour again (endeavour, I think, being the largest and most imposing word, I am resolved to stick with endeavour as much as possible), though my doubts remain: for I have no skill in the art of composition, and I fear that, even if I succeed in writing the History, it will be a dull affair, since I am no Gulliver and have no adventures to fill up the pages.

       THE HISTORY OF THE ELEPHANT

       CHAPTER I

      I WAS born, the older of two children, in the village of Thornhill, Somersetshire, in the year of our Lord 1753. My father was head groom to Mr. John Harrington, a sugar merchant, who owned half a dozen ships trading out of the city of Bristol; these had brought him such wealth that he had acquired an estate, comprising some two thousand acres of farms and woodland. Mr. Harrington was very fond of riding over his land, and maintained a stable comprising some ten horses. From a very young age, it may be no more than two or three, I used to leave my mother’s side and accompany my father as he walked from the village to the stables. I loved the warmth of the stables and the sweet smells of straw and dung, and I loved the horses, with their soft noses and large ears and intelligent eyes. I thought of the horses as my friends, and gave them names. There was one mare, a roan with a white blaze on her head, whom I named Star-light; I used to kiss her muzzle and talk to her, telling her stories that I supposed might amuse her, and she would prick her ears and appear to listen. I loved her greatly and persuaded myself that she loved me in return—imagining, even, that I was not a human being but a horse. One summer’s evening, when I may have been six years of age, I fell asleep against her body in the straw, which caused a great alarm in my family, my mother and father passing a sleepless night in the belief that I had been stolen by gypsies, as happened occasionally in those days. When I was discovered, they did not know whether to be pleased or angry.

      From this, you may draw the conclusion that I grew up a solitary boy, but I had the company of other children in Thornhill and Gillerton, and also of my younger brother, Jim, and we often played together round the stables. However, of the horses in Mr. Harrington’s stables, six were cart-horses, two hunters, and two hackneys, that is, road-horses, and while the carthorses were placid, heavy beasts, the hunters and hackneys had some thorough-bred in them and their tempers were far less certain. One of the hunters in particular, a big bay gelding, had a very nervous disposition, and one day he kicked out, and caught Jim a severe blow between the eyes. He was obliged to lie in darkness for more than a week, and, although he recovered, was left with the memory of the accident in the form of a scar on his forehead, and a plague of head-aches; which I think, more than anything else, gave him his timid, retiring character and fitted him for his later life as a gardener. He developed a great fear of horses, and for ever after avoided the stables.

      My father, who saw my love of horses, made it his business to teach me as much as he could on that subject. He would tell me how, if a horse were short of breath, and his flanks shivering, he might be suffering from the Strangles; if he were dim of sight, and lay down shivering, it was a sign of the Staggers; if his breath stank, or foul matter issued from the nostrils, he might have an Ulcer, unless the matter were white, in which case it was the Glanders, or black, when it was the Mourning of the Chine, which is a kind of consumption. He taught me to watch for the colour of a horse’s urine, and the nature of his stool. Once, he led me up to a cart-horse which was suffering from worms. ‘Three different kinds of worms will attack a horse,’ he said, ‘the bot, the trunchion and the red maw worm. Lift her tail.’ I did so, and I must have been very young, for my eyes were level with her fundament. ‘Now put in thy hand.’ I was afraid that she would kick out, but my father told me that she would not kick. So I stood on tip-toe and slid in my hand. ‘Further. To the elbow. Further. Now, what dost feel? With thy fingers. Dost feel something wriggling?’ I said that I did, though I was not sure. ‘Pull him out.’ I did so, and found my wet fingers holding a little worm with a great head and small tail. ‘That is a bot,’ said my father. ‘He lives on the great gut and is easily pulled out. The trunchion and the maw worm live higher up. The trunchion is black and thick. The maw worm is long and thin and red.’

      I remember being amazed by the vast store of my father’s knowledge, but he had learnt from his father, and in addition he owned a treasured copy of Gervase Markham’s ‘Maister-Peece’, which has been called the Farrier’s Bible. However, my father was his own man and did not agree with everything in Markham; for instance, in the matter of red worms, old Markham held that the first remedy was to bind human dung round the bit or snaffle, and, if that failed, thrust the guts of a hen down the horse's throat, whereas my father, on the contrary, believed a strong purge to be sufficient, though he purged only with great caution. Grooms in general think that a purge has worked only if it brings on a hurricane, but too strong a purge may kill a horse, especially if it is given to a horse which is weak or delicate, or which has an inflammation of the blood. However, there can be no doubt, that purges are very valuable in cleansing impurities. Every groom has his favourite ingredients for purges, and while Markham preferred Nitre, my father used coarse Aloes and Rhubarb, or Cassia, rolled into balls the size of a pullet’s egg, and given in spring and autumn.

      I also learnt by watching my father at work, so that, by the age of eight or nine, I already knew the points of a good horse: that the mouth should be deep, the chest broad, the shoulders deep and the rump level with the withers, the tongue not too large, the neck not too long, the eye not too prottuberant. I knew how to bleed and purge, and how to cough a horse, that is, to try the soundness of his wind, by compressing the upper pipe of the wesand, or wind-pipe, between finger and thumb, and how to apply a glister, that is, luke-warm, and slowly. I knew how to tell a horse’s age from the condition of his gums, from the gloss on his coat, and from a particular mark which appears on his front teeth, from the fifth to the ninth year, when it disappears; but I also knew how to detect the practice of bishoping, whereby the teeth are filed clean to make the animal seem younger; indeed, I remember that my father once shewed me a crone of a horse which, to judge from its hollowed cheeks and fading coat, must have been fully twenty years old, yet its teeth had been filed and cut to make it appear ten years the younger. My father’s most important