Chapter 1
Review of the Year
As this chapter is being written the Year of the Horse is slowly giving way to the Year of the Sheep. The gallant steed is dying hardly and there will be a day or two more of confusion before the ear-shattering obsequies are complete and the Sheep brings peace and a new lunar year. In the East the horse is a symbol of authority, moving proudly against a background of panoply and war. He has an arrogant beauty and it is when his nostrils are distended, his mane flowing and his hooves battering the earth that he is a fit subject for portraiture. The domestic virtues of the Western horse are not appreciated. Constable, the brewers and the governess in her car would all have been thought guilty of debasing a fiery and independent animal to the level of some ruminant buffalo or ox with powers of traction but few other virtues.
Nevertheless it was in his Western guise that the Horse descended upon this small area of his influence a year ago. There have been no manifestations of arrogance, no glorious advances and no spectacular retreats. The pace has been forward and steady and slow. The year of the Cart-horse, in fact,-or, in one grim sense, of the camel.
The burden of the resettlement problem, which was described in last year's review, is not the sort of thing that could be lifted by a single dramatic effort or an
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