the knows this and rides him on a native saddle a kind of thick so that he is able to sit far back almost on the animal s tail indeed as doubtless for the same reason the rides a donkey to the stranger until he grows accustomed to it this saddle is most but old in the island generally prefer to use it upon a long journey also it is dangerous to the since the are very short not being fixed they slide from side to side suddenly themselves let us say to the right with any movement which will produce a on the left and the unexpected consequence that the traveller finds himself face downwards on the ground with a european saddle this particular accident cannot happen also it is more comfortable for a short as a set off to this advantage however the rider s weight comes upon that portion of his which is least able to support it namely the the result is that the mule especially if pushed a winter pilgrimage out of its customary sometimes falls as though it were shot him over its head it is a mistake to suppose also that these creatures are always sure footed many of them although they do not often actually fall i forget my first mule ride in in the days when there were no roads it was from to a distance of about sixteen miles over a mountain path the into whose charge i was given was a huge man weighing at least eighteen stone and i thought to myself that where this monster could go certainly i could follow in this i was right i did follow but at a very considerable distance mr perched himself upon his animal doubtless one of the best in the island looking in his long robes for all the world like a gigantic and half filled sack and o� f we scarcely were we clear of the town when my mule i suppose to the weight upon his and the european saddle began to i do not when i say that he stumbled all the way to keeping me absolutely damp with apprehension of sudden on to my head down and unpleasant places meanwhile mr very possibly my difficulties had been careful to place about five yards between us a distance which he maintained throughout the journey i for assistance � in fact i wished to persuade him to exchange � but either he would not or he could not hear moreover he had no knowledge of my tongue or i of his so we accomplished that very disagreeable journey once however i made one much more dangerous this time over the rarely travelled mountains of in my companions i remember had excellent � they lived in the country that given to me as the lighter weight was weak and poor with no fore legs worth mentioning we scrambled up the somehow but when it to descending the fan began a road in then at any rate was made of three part first a deep and ditch worn out by the feet of generations of animals covered at the bottom with from six inches to a foot of red butter or clay quite as greasy as butter down which one slowly secondly stretches sometimes miles in length of swamp land where the path consists of little of hard clay about two feet apart the space between each ridge into which the mule must step filled with some three feet of liquid and mud that often reached to the saddle when the were passed great tracts of the most which to my taste were worst of all along these the path never more than three to five feet in width would run across and sloping rock very slippery in nature below yawned more or less sheer of anything from two to fifteen hundred feet in depth now a mule always chooses the extreme edge of a precipice for this reason its load is commonly bound on in far or bags were it therefore to walk on the inner side of the path it would constantly strike its burden against the cliff so not being troubled with nerves it to the outer edge a common result is that in going round a comer it meets another mule proceeding from the opposite direction in the attempt to struggle past one of the pair into space and with it the load or man on this particular journey i very nearly came to a sudden and end the mule will not go your way he always goes his own at one point in the precipice path it the lower fork being a winter pilgrimage rough but safe and solid the upper which travelled round some twenty yards and then again joined the lower smooth but exceeding greasy the mule insisted upon taking the top road with the result that when we reached its he began to slide down we shot ten or fifteen paces to the very edge of that awful cliff and i confess it without shame i have rarely been in such a fright in my indeed i thought that i must be gone there seemed no help for it since to was quite impossible at the utter verge of the gulf however the animal put on a sort of of which a mule alone has the secret and when its head was absolutely hanging over it we stopped that day also this same creature fell with me in the midst of a river and in the evening i ended an entertaining journey by being across another roaring torrent some eighty yards wide in a of string attached to a very rotten rope along which i was pulled in but of the varied experiences of that expedition i must not stop to tell i lived through it so let its memory be blessed still i do not wish to the mule as 