Krall, on the other hand, adores his pupils; and this atmosphere
of affection has in a manner of speaking humanized them. There
are no longer those sudden movements of wild panic which reveal
the ancestral dread of man in the quietest and best-trained
horse. He talks to them long and tenderly, as a father might talk
to his children; and we have the strange feeling that they listen
to all that he says and understand it. If they appear not to
grasp an explanation or a demonstration, he will begin it all
over again, analyze it, paraphrase it ten times in succession,
with the patience of a mother. And so their progress has been
incomparably swifter and more astounding than that of old Hans.
Within a fortnight of the first lesson Mohammed did simple little
addition and subtraction sums quite correctly. He had learnt to
distinguish the tens from the units, striking the latter with his
right foot and the former with his left. He knew the meaning of
the symbols plus and minus. Four days later, he was beginning
multiplication and division. In four months' time, he knew how to
extract square and cubic roots; and, soon after, he learnt to
spell and read by means of the conventional alphabet devised by
Krall.
This alphabet, at the first glance, seems rather complicated. For
that matter, it is only a makeshift; but how could one find
anything better? The unfortunate horse, who is almost voiceless,
has only one way in which to express himself: a clumsy hoof,
which was not created to put thought into words.
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