Half a dozen of us mounted the ungainly affairs and submitted to the indignity of making a ridiculous spectacle of ourselves through the principal streets of a town of 10,000 inhabitants.
We started.

It was not a trot, a gallop, or a canter, but a stampede, and made up of all possible or conceivable gaits.

No spurs were necessary.

There was a muleteer to every donkey and a dozen volunteers beside, and they banged the donkeys with their goad sticks, and pricked them with their spikes, and shouted something that sounded like "Sekki-yah!" and kept up a din and a racket that was worse than Bedlam itself.

These rascals were all on foot, but no matter, they were always up to time--they can outrun and outlast a donkey.