CHAPTER IV. 



THE ARABIAN" HORSE. 



The Arabian, the horse of romance The horse naturally foreign to Arabia 

 Superiority of the camel for all Arabian needs Scarcity of horses in Arabia 

 in Mohammed's time Various preposterous traditious of Arab horseman- 

 ship The Prophet's mythical mares Mohammed not in any sense a 

 horseman Early English Arabians the Markham Arabian The alleged 

 Royal Mares The Darley Arabian The Godolphin Arabian The Prince 

 of Wales' Arabian race horses Mr. Blunt's pilgrimage to the Euphrates 

 His purchases of so-called Arabians Deyr as a great horse market where 

 everything is thoroughbred Failure of Mr. Blunt's experiments Various 

 Arabian horses brought to America Horses sent to our Presidents Dis- 

 astrous experiments of A. Keene Richards Tendency of Arab romancing 

 from Ben Hur. 



ADMIRATION always leads to exaggeration. This is true in 

 most of the relations of life, but in our admiration of the horse it 

 becomes greatly intensified, so greatly indeed that in magnifying 

 his excellent qualities we find ourselves telling downright false- 

 hoods about him before we know it. This "amiable weakness," 

 as we might call it, is true of our everyday life and our everyday 

 horses; but when we come to the horse that is the universal ideal 

 of perfection, everybody seems to lay aside all the restraints of 

 truth in extolling the superiority of his qualities. The "Arabian 

 horse" is the ideal horse of all the world. He is the "gold 

 standard" in all horsedom, with the one important distinction 

 that the one is real and the other is mythical. Not one so-called 

 horseman in a million ever saw a genuine Arabian horse, nor any 

 of the descendants of one; and in all the discussions of the past 

 three hundred and fifty years it has never been shown in a single 

 instance that a horse from Arabia, with an authenticated pedi- 

 gree and tracing as such, has ever been of any value, either as a 

 race horse or as a progenitor of race horses. The superior quali- 

 ties of "the Arabian horse," like the superior qualities of "The 

 Arabian Nights," are purely works of the imagination. There 

 is just as much truth in the stories of Sindbad the Sailor and 



