DEVELOP SPEED IN HORSES. 51 



you can find, for when a pacing horse hits his knee, 

 squarely, with the other fore foot moving at speed, and 

 without boots, you will have a cripple for some time, and 

 you therefore should never take any chances. Knee and 

 quarter boots are ordinarily all the boots you will need; 

 they are at all events the most important, any others that 

 may be needed will suggest themselves as time pro 

 gresses. A pacer can move rapidly with his head ele- 

 vated by the check pretty high, with greater ease to him- 

 self than can a trotter. You will notice by close attention 

 that nearly every pacer that can go fast, goes with his 

 head in a peculiar position, nearly all higher than you 

 would expect to see them carry their heads if they were 

 trotting. There are some exceptions to this rule, it is 

 true, but in teaching a pacer to go, you will want his'head 

 pretty well up, and you can gauge the matter as the re- 

 quirements indicate. In five weeks from the time you 

 take a green pacer in hand you will be able to judge 

 pretty accurately whether you have got any 7iatural speed 

 or not. For the horse should — if he was in good plight, as 

 regards flesh and soundness when you took him in hand — 

 have shown you he has some speed, if there is any 

 in him — in four or five weeks. It is the theory of 

 some good trainers, that a pacer tires in his legs before 

 he co«;s any where else, as evidenced by the fact, that 

 when a pacer does leave his feet, he generally makes a 

 wild losing break, and is rarely a good breaker. The lat- 

 eral movements of the pacing gait will, I think, help to 

 establish this theory, as the power applied to move the 

 body along at the rapid pace, is not distributed as in the 

 the trotter, and he consequently tires sooner. The long 

 distant matches of earlier times substantiates this theory ; 

 notably, the ten mile races between Kentucky Prince and 

 Hero, the pacer, in 1853, for $5,000 a side, each race ; in 

 the first Hero was stopped in the seventh mile, and in the 

 last he struggled on and quit in the tenth mile. Although 

 Hero had a v/orld of speed and had shown a mile in 2-1 8^, 

 he tired, and in the last race, nine miles in a trifle less 

 than twenty-five minutes, was the best he could do. 



