For a few days a partial alleviation from too minute attention to the pains of the experiment were found in vigorous horseback exercise. The friend to whose serviceableness in pecuniary matters I have already alluded, offered me the use of a saddle-horse. The larger of the two animals which I found in his Stable was much too heroic in appearance for me in my state of exhaustion to venture upon. Besides this, his Roman nose and severe gravity of aspect somehow reminded me, whenever I entered his stall, of the late Judge ----, to whose Lectures on the Constitution I had listened in my youth, and in my then condition of moral humiliation I felt the impropriety of putting the saddle on an animal connected with such respectable associations. No such scruples interfered with the use of the other animal, which was kept chiefly, I believe, for servile purposes. He was small and mean-looking--his foretop and mane in a hopeless tangle, with hay-seed on his eyelids, and damp straws scattered promiscuously around his body.
Inconsiderable as this animal was, both in size and action, he was almost too much for me, in the weak state to which I was now reduced. This much, however, I owe him; disreputable-looking as he was, he was still a something upon whidi my mind could rest as a point of diversion from myself--a something outside of my own miseries. At this time the sense of physical exhaustion had become so great that it required an effort to perform the most common act. The business of dressing was a serious tax upon the energies. To put on a coat, or draw on a boot, was no light labor, and was succeeded by such a feeling of prostration as required the morning before I could master sufficient energy to venture upon the needed exercise. The distance to my friend's stable was trifling. Sometimes I would find there the negro man to whose care the horses were entrusted, but more frequently he was absent. A feeling of humiliation at being seen by any one at a loss how to mount a horse of so diminutive proportions, would triumph over the sense of bodily weakness whenever he was present to bridle and saddle him. Whenever he was not at hand the task of getting the saddle on the pony's back was a long and arduous one. As for lifting it from its hook and throwing it to its place, I could as easily have thrown the horse itself over the stable. The only way in which it could be effected was by first pushing the saddle from its hook, checking its fall to the floor by the hand, and then resting till the violent action of the heart had somewhat abated; next, with occasional failures, to throw it over the edge of the low manger; then an interval of panting rest. Shortening the halter so far as to bring the pony's head close to the manger, next enabled me easily to push him into a line nearly parallel with it, leaving me barely space enough to pass between. By lengthening the stirrup strap I was enabled to get it across his neck, and by much pulling, finally haul the saddle to its proper place. By a kind of desperation of will I commonly succeeded, though by no means always. Sometimes the mortification and rage at a failure so contemptible assured success on a second trial, with apparently less expenditure of exertion than at first. Occasionally, however, I was forced to call for assistance from sheer exhaustion. The bridling was comparatively an easy matter; with his head so closely tied to the manger little scope was left for dodging. In the irritable condition I was now in, the most trifling opposition made me angry, and anger gave me strength; and in this sudden vigor of mind the issue of our daily struggle was, I believe, with a single exception, on my side.