THE ARABIAN HORSE. 63 



without really being in Arabia, and this is all that can be said of 

 "The Bedouin Tribes of the Euphrates" without having seen a 

 real Bedouin. 



No doubt Mr. Blunt thinks he is right in his high appreciation 

 of the town of Deyr as a horse market; that it is "the best 

 market for thoroughbreds in Asia; 7 ' and that "there are no 

 horses in Deyr but thoroughbreds," or he would not have bought 

 his horses there. Dealing in horses seems to be the principal 

 business of the people, they are all well informed on the best and 

 purest strains of blood, according to Mr. Blunt, and all their own 

 horses are thoroughbred. Truly an ideal market, an ideal people, 

 and ideal horses, just suited to the needs of enthusiastic amateurs 

 like Mr. Blunt. This remarkable horse town is located on the 

 border between the rich grain fields and luxuriant meadows on the 

 north, and the comparatively barren deserts of the south. On 

 the north the country has been famous for thousands of years for 

 the great numbers and excellence of the horses produced, and 

 they are still produced of excellent form and quality, and are sold 

 at very low prices. On the south is the land of the camel, and 

 but few horses and those few held at high prices, and the simple 

 term "Arabian horse" always brings them purchasers. Here, 

 then, we find that Deyr is the very paradise of horse traders a 

 tribe, wherever we find them on the face of the earth, distin- 

 guished for elasticity of conscience. The north furnishes the 

 horses and the south furnishes the pedigrees, and no wonder the 

 Deyrites had nothing but "thoroughbreds" when Mr. Blunt came 

 along. In the 1'ne of their business and from their southern 

 neighbors, they had picked up enough "Arabian horse talk" to 

 satisfy all inexperienced buyers that they knew all about the value 

 of the different strains of Arabian blood, and could supply them 

 from their own studs, au very reasonable prices. And thus Mr. 

 Blunt brought home to England eighteen "Arabian" mares and 

 two stallions, without any satisfactory evidence that they ever 

 had seen Arabia. In this enthusiastic venture, resulting in utter 

 failure, there is one alleviating fact that Mr. Blunt can call to 

 mind, and that is that his horses were just as good for the pur- 

 pose of improving the English race horse as any others that 

 have been brought from the Orient in the past hundred years. 

 Whatever their blood, whether genuine or counterfeit Arabians, 

 they have all alike been failures, and all alike good for nothing. 



Early in the history of our own government it became not an 



