86 THE HOUSE OF AMERICA. 



mind of every one that the English race horse is thoroughly com- 

 posite in the blood he inherits, and it is beyond the powers of 

 analysis to determine whether one element did more than another 

 in making him the fastest running horse in the world. 



While it might be forcibly, if not conclusively, argued that the 

 native English horse had in him all the elements necessary to the 

 development of a breed of race horses as great as the breed of 

 our own day, there is one fact ever present to the senses which 

 goes to show that the influence of exotic blood was very wide and 

 very powerful in controlling the action of the race horse. The 

 popular and prevailing pacing action of the Hobbies, the Gal- 

 loways, and other hunting, racing and saddle tribes was com- 

 pletely wiped out more than a hundred years ago. Any attempt 

 to account for this revolution in the gait of the English horse as 

 a fancy of fashion, or on the introduction of wheeled vehicles, 

 fails to satisfy the understanding. In the first half of the seven- 

 teenth century pacers were popular, common, and abounded 

 everywhere. In the second half of the eighteenth century not 

 one could be found in air Britain, "from Land's End to John 

 O'G-roat's House." Of all the facts that are known and estab- 

 lished in the history of the English horse, the wiping out of the 

 pacer is the most striking and significant. This exterminating 

 process was not limited to the families that were intended for 

 hunting or racing purposes, but extended to all types and breeds 

 of English horses. The little English pacers that had been the 

 favorites of kings and princes and nobles for so many centuries 

 were submerged in the streams of Saracenic blood that flowed in 

 upon them, and their only legitimate descendants left upon the 

 face of the earth found homes in the American colonies. 

 Their blood is one of the principal elements in the foundation of 

 the English race horse, but the "lateral action" in his progeny 

 was esteemed a bar-sinister on the escutcheon of the stallion, and 

 it was sought to be covered up with something more fashionable 

 in name. The old saddle horses of England were not all pacers, 

 although that habit of action was very general among them, and 

 in some families it was more uniform and confirmed than in 

 others, and my authority for this conclusion will be found in the 

 detailed account of the horses brought from England to the 

 American colonies early in the seventeenth century. It is evi- 

 dent that from the day the blood of the Saracenic horse was 

 brought in contact with that of the indigenous saddle horse, they 



