118 THE HORSE OF AMERICA. 



some few in the neighborhood of New York. They ride with their toes ju^t 

 under the horse's nose, and their stirrup straps Jef c extremely long, and the sad- 

 dle being put three or four inches on the mane. As for the management of the 

 reins, it is what they have no conception of. A trot is odious to them, and 

 they express the utmost astonishment at a person who can like that uneasy 

 gait, as they call it. The favorite gaits which all their horses are taught are 

 a pace and a wrack. In the first the animal moves his two feet on one side at 

 the same time and gets on with a sort of a shuffling motion, being unable to 

 spring from the ground on these two feet, as in a trot. We should call this an 

 unnatural gait, as none of our horses would ever move in that manner without 

 a rider; bat the Americans insist upon it that it is otherwise, because many of 

 their colts pace as soon as born. These kind of horses are called "natural 

 pacers" and it is a matter of the utmost difficulty to make them move in any 

 other manner. But it is not one horse in five hundred that would pace without 

 being taught." 



There can hardly be a doubt that our English friend in his 

 ^'Travels Through the States" noted and wrote down just what 

 he thought he saw, and when he saw anything that he never had 

 seen in England, he was ready to either deny its existence alto- 

 gether or to insist that there was some mistake about it. Poor 

 man, he could not understand how there could be anything out- 

 side of England that could not be found in England. His 

 vision, mental and physical, seems to have been restricted to the 

 shores of his own island home, and he was probably a descendant 

 of a very good man we once heard of. As you sail up the Firth 

 of Clyde you pass an island of three or four miles in extent, 

 called Cumbrae. At the head of ecclesiastical affairs in the 

 island was a very pious man, some generations back, and every 

 Sunday morning he prayed that the Lord would bless the "king- 

 dom of Cumbrae and the adjacent islands of Great Britain and 

 Ireland." The author of "Travels Through the States" was 

 evidently one of the very numerous descendants of this good 

 man, as they are scattered all over England, and as I am a strong 

 believer in the laws of heredity, I can hardly avoid this conclu- 

 sion. Indeed, some of the numerous tribe, tracing their genealogy 

 through many generations back to "The kingdom of Cumbrae," 

 have found their way across the water, and at another place I 

 will pay my respects to them. But to return to our traveler: 

 there can be no doubt about his never having seen a pacer in 

 England, for the last one had disappeared before his day, unless 

 an occasional one might have been found in the old province of 

 Galloway, in the southern part of Scotland. If he had known 



