126 THE HORSE OF AMERICA. 



thrilling and electrical. Every man who loved his home and his 

 country obeyed it. True, as I have said, it was drawn in the 

 form of advice and in the interests of "economy/' but there was 

 but one great evil, one great prodigality at which it was aimed, 

 and that was the gambling connected with horse racing. It was 

 well aimed and struck the bull's eye. It came in the midst of 

 preparations for the greatest race meetings ever then projected, 

 but everything was dropped and there it lay through all the years 

 of the bloody struggle and until peace again smiled upon a land 

 of free men. Before avowed hostilities commenced, Mr. James 

 De Lancey, one of the first and largest importers and breeders of 

 his day, sold out every animal of the horse kind that he pos- 

 sessed and retired to England. Thus, as the colonial period 

 drew to its close, the brave little colonial horse that had weath- 

 ered the storms of a hundred winters and carried his master in 

 safety and comfort through all that time, is superseded by an- 

 other race, and no one has ever attempted to write even so much 

 as his epitaph. 



As the contests of speed considered, up to this point, have all 

 been at the running gait, I must not close my review of this 

 colony without giving some attention to the pacers and the trot- 

 ters. At these gaits all sources of information are almost hope- 

 lessly barren of facts and incidents. We know that the running 

 horses of the colonial period were the saddle horses of the coun- 

 try, and we know that the best and most fashionable saddle 

 horses were pacers. When we connect these two facts and place 

 them alongside of the pacing and trotting experiences of Penn- 

 sylvania and New Jersey, we have no difficulty in reaching the 

 safe conclusion that the same conditions would produce the same 

 results as in those two States. Pacing and trotting contests 

 were just as frequent and as exciting in this colony as in any 

 other, but they were sustained chiefly by road-house keepers 

 and butchers, and were never advertised. Matches were made 

 one hour and decided on the road in the next. In the "Annals of 

 New York," compiled and published in 1832, by John F. Watson, 

 we find the following curious, but very valuable, scrap of horse 

 history : 



" Some twenty or thirty years before the Revolution, the steeds most prized 

 for the saddle were pacers, since so odious deemed. To this end the breed was 

 propagated with much care. The Narragansett pacers of Rhode Island were in 

 such repute that they were sent for, at much trouble and expense, by some few 



