Puck might girdle the earth for forty cents, but he could earn forty dollars in girthing a cadet Mule. With each contact of strap or buckle the white of his eye gleams poisonously and his outraged epidermis gives a sudden convulsive shudder, like a fine lady's bare shoulder vitalized by a mosquito-bite. But he is helpless and supine as a fat alderman after a banquet, lying stomach upwards and feebly gesticulating with his heels. With the final linking together of the detached tackle into one engirdling gearage, the first step in his humiliation is completed, and the pantings of his suppressed fury mingle with the chokings of his self-contempt. From that hour he is a changed Mule. Man delights him not, nor small boys either. Straps leave invisible, indelible marks of servitude, as a blow from a parent leaves a scar on the soul of the child. Harnessed and humiliated, abased and abashed, the higher regions of pride and independence wherein he has pranced with all the lofty grace of a thoroughbred, know him no more forever. Mirabeau had swallowed all formulas. The Mule recruit has swallowed all traditions, foretaste of much else, good and bad, he will be obliged to swallow,--but the bridle-bit, of all fabricated things, alas! he can not swallow.
In this clinging, clanking harness-toggery cribbed and confined, he is led out to where five shamefaced fellow-martyrs wait to endure with him the culminating indignity. The Mule units are now to be transmuted into a Mule team, for the glory of Yankee Doodle, and an entirely novel programme of acrobatic marvels is to be enacted.
No sooner have the predestined six been, with infinite patience and circumspection, aligned and coupled and to the monstrous vehicle deftly attached, than down they all go in a heap, a rolling, plunging mass of offensive partisanship, in one dusty burial blent. Entangled, prostrate, writhing like a coil of rattlesnakes; each eager nose, and active heel, and tufted tail, points all ways at once, like a mariner's needle in a thunder-storm. In this tumbling, tearing glomer a philosopher might presciently discern the symbol and essence of anarchy, the spirit of centrifugality, the revolt against _status quo_, the protest of energetic natures against human government, or self-government, or any other government.