ANTIQUITY AND HISTORY OF THE PACING HORSE. 163 



that it is a slower and less pronounced gait, and hence we are 

 often told a given horse did not pace, but "he ambled off." In 

 all that we have found in the writings of the past, and in all that 

 I have seen with my own eyes, I have not been able to discover 

 that there is any distinction between the amble and the pace. 

 The only distinction is not in the gait itself, but in the fact that 

 our ancestors, four hundred years ago, used the word "amble" 

 to express precisely the same thing that their descendants now 

 express by the word "pace." The only sense in which the word 

 "amble" is used among, the horsemen of this country is to de- 

 scribe a kind of slow, incipient pace that many horses, both run- 

 ners and trotters, show when recalled for a fresh start in scoring 

 for a race. This probably indicates, whether in the case of a 

 runner or a trotter, that somewhere, not very far removed, there 

 is a pacing inheritance, and this incipient amble, as it is some- 

 times called, comes from that inheritance. It is also possible 

 that it may arise from the excitement of the start and the confu- 

 sion consequent upon the contest. 



At the close of Queen Elizabeth's reign, about the beginning 

 of the seventeenth century, the pacing horse of England was at 

 the highest point of his utility and fame. He was the horse for 

 the race course, he was the horse for the hunting field, and he was 

 the horse for the saddle. He was able to beat King James' 

 Arabian, and with the few Barbs that had then been brought in, 

 the historian informs us, he was able to hold his own. There 

 were two tribes of his congeners, the Galloway and the Irish 

 Hobbie, the former from Southwestern Scotland and the north of 

 England, and the latter from Ireland. These tribes were chiefly 

 pacers, and not a few of them were distinguished as running 

 horses. The Bald Galloway, as he was called, was a grand repre- 

 sentative of his tribe. He was simply a native pony with a bald 

 face, and he was a capital runner for his day, and a number of 

 his get were distinguished runners. True, he is tricked out in 

 the Stud Book with a pedigree, wholly fictitious, and that no- 

 body ever heard of for a hundred years after he was foaled, but 

 that did not prevent his daughter Roxana, when bred to Godol- 

 phin Arabian, from producing two of his greatest sons, Lath and 

 Cade. This topic, however, has already been considered in the 

 chapter on the English Race Horse. The Galloways were very 

 famous as pacers in their day, and it seems they were about the 

 last remnants of the pacing tribes to be found in England. It 



