The Adventures of a Donkey

This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design. Jemmy Donkey tells his own story with wit, vanity, and a keen eye for the absurdities of human life. From his mother's lessons on patience and humility to his first dazzled dreams of elegance, he is forever torn between self-importance and hard-earned wisdom. Tempted by status, food, and attention, he blunders into milk, ale, mishaps, and painful punishments, learning that pride and imitation bring ridicule while contentment and self-control offer truer dignity. As Jemmy passes from hand to hand, he discovers both cruelty and kindness: Balaam's stern practicality, Mrs. Bond's shelter, and the thoughtless treatment of spoiled Master Frederick, whose fear, arrogance, and violence expose the brutality hidden in ordinary households. Harnessed, sold, and displayed, Jemmy is judged by appearance, made to work, and humiliated before crowds, yet he also encounters defenders who condemn abuse and insist on compassion for working animals. From carting bricks with blinkers to being left in a bleak Bromley field and finally sold on toward London, Jemmy's comic, self-aware memoir becomes a sharp satire of class, labor, vanity, and the moral responsibility humans owe the creatures they command.