A Horse's Tale Author:Mark Twain This is the story of a girl who, according to the testimony of Mammy Dorcas, was born twins, the boy twin submerged, but active, urging the gentle girl twin to play boy-plays and rough-riding and startling bursts of temper. Cathy was not born for study. When asked, "What does the Czar govern?" she questioned doubtfully the dative case. She defin... more »ed chaplain as the diminutive of chap, and a cube as a native of Cuba. Gay, self-reliant, brave was Cathy, and her story, closely interwoven to the end with that of the horse she loved, is something other than the kind of tale one naturally expects from Mr. Clemens He is wholly himself, however, in the preface. He needed a bull-fight, he tells us, so he took it from John Hay's Castilian Days. His knowledge he borrowed from Army Regulations and books on tactics; the horse's private bugle call is an opening strain in Sylvia; certain ideas he took from Herodotus; the cats in a certain picture belong to somebody else; otherwise the book is his own. It is needless to add that even with these borrowings there is plenty left for originality's sake. ?The Unitarian Register, Volume 86 [1908] ?The protagonists are an attractive little girl and her horse. The action begins briskly and cheerfully at a military post in the far West, with soldiers, Indians, and Buffalo Bill for supernumeraries, and ends pathetically at a bull-fight in Spain.? ?TheNation [1910] In a characteristic mingling of humor and pathos Mark Twain writes ?A Horse?s Tale?, allowing a finely bred animal belonging to Buffalo Bill to tell the story of his life, more particularly that portion of it which deals with his small mistress, the orphaned niece of an American officer stationed on the frontier. The child is Spanish on her mother's side, but loyally American nevertheless. She has adventures galore, and takes her good horse, a present from its owner, back to Spain with her, where he is lost. The end is tragic?needlessly and unexpectedly so. ?The World To-day, Volume 14 [1908] A story of funny pathos and pathetic fun, mixed as Mark Twain has the trick of doing it?without "slopping over." ?Everybody's Magazine, Volume 18 [1908]« less