ORDERS. 113 



Captain McGowan lasted ; and he was the hardest- 

 pulling horse in America, I suppose. Dexter pulls a 

 pound or two, I can assure you ; and he has shown his 

 capacity to go on. The truth is, that the pulling horses 

 last well enough, but the riders do not last so long. It 

 is just so with the runners." 



Orders. — As a rule, never give orders, if your jockey 

 is a fairly good one, though the trainer might briefly 

 tell him the horse's good and bad points from a racing 

 point of view. It is always injudicious to lay down 

 precise directions, such as to keep a certain number 

 of lengths behind the leading horse, who may be sent 

 from the start to cut out the running for another, at 

 a pace which might cause him to collapse long before 

 the distance post is reached ; or to wait on some par- 

 ticular horse — a proceeding which has been the cause of 

 many a mistake, for the dreaded one may turn out a 

 rank duffer which is unable to go fast, so that the jockey, 

 by waiting on him, may have in the meantime allowed 

 the others to get so far ahead that he will not be able to 

 catch them before it is too late ; or he may run himself 

 to a standstill in endeavouring to keep the lead ail 

 through. If a jockey be capable of carrying out minute 

 instructions, he will certainly be clever enough to accom- 



I 



