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Show the jack, but then she came in heat and that jackass started following her around, braying fit to sour the cow's milk, the most persistent wooer I ever saw, wouldn't take no for an answer, totally unaffected by scorn, comtempt, insult and the most stinging rebuffs. She wasn't tall enough to kick him in the head , so he kept following and she kept running, and I asked Dad to please get that ugly beast out of there before he ran Beauty to death. Dad said expercise was good for her figure --/^no one loved Beauty like I did. And one day I noticed that though she couldn't kick hard and couldn't kick high, she was so steady at it that the jack's chest was a bloody mess. Still he persisted. He came up behind her with that milk-curdling bray, she let him have it with both feet and then ran; he followed, dong swinging, she pasted him again, again ran. I didn't sfy anything to Dad, smug. But when he saw his expensive jackass being kicked to hamburger, he howled all/right, and banished Beauty to the corral and dry fodder. So we noticed early that she was in foal. I had no doubt she had been assaulted, the jack guilty of rape, but now that I know he couldn't have been, not without us holding her, I also understand more of Beauty's blind' drive to perpetuate herself. The irony is that a mule is the end of the line, a dead-end, all his time self-contained. I was hurt that the Shetland stallion hadn't been successful instead, but I knew, grudgingly, that he had been only willing while the jackass had been able as well, and not only able but persistent enough to succeed when the odds, given his nature and Beauty's distaste, looked hopeless. But hell, Venus wasn't married to Apollo but to Vulcan, ugly and lame and probably sooty as well. However I might wish that Venus and Apollo had had an affair, Beauty and beautiful Truth coupling on the sly to produce Eros, so appropriately to marry Psyche, I see no evidence that it happened. I do know that M/e. , „, Beauty produced a mule, which^should have been named Thanatos. By winter she was heavy with it, her trim little barrel swollen, her |