THE ORLOFF TROTTER. 39 J' 



Orloff is restricted to certain lines of blood and is protected 

 .against competition from others that might beat hiii. The 

 American is free, from all restrictions of blood and gathers up 

 all that is best and fastest. He neither asks nor accepts protec- 

 tion from any quarter, but throws down the glove to all comers. 



BELLFOUNDER was imported from England, July, 1822, by 

 James Boott, of Boston, Mass. He was placed in the hands of 

 .Samuel Jaques, Jr. a very shrewd manager who understood the 

 use of printer's ink and did not hesitate about employing it liber 

 ally. In his advertisement for 1823 he says: "This celebrated 

 horse is a bright bay with black legs, standing fifteen hands 

 high." From this we are safe in concluding he was not more 

 than fifteen hands, and from another contemporaneous source 

 it is learned that he was a little below that measurement. On 

 this point the recollections, or perhaps impressions, of Orange 

 County horsemen are not very trustworthy, as one of them places 

 his height at sixteen hands and others at fifteen and a half. 

 His pedigree was given on the card which was distributed by his 

 groom in the form following: "Got by old Bellfounder, out 

 of Velocity by Haphazard, by Sir Peter out of Miss Hervey 

 T)y Eclipse." "Velocity trotted on the Norwich road in 1806, 

 sixteen miles in one hour, and although she broke five times into 

 a gallop, and as often turned round, she won her match." Al- 

 though after diligent search I have not been able to find this 

 performance of Velocity, it may be true that a mare so named 

 may have trotted as represented, but she was not a daughter of 

 Haphazard. The dates make this utterly impossible, and Mr. 

 Jaques was smart enough never to put this humbug pedigree in 

 his elaborate advertisements that appeared in the leading agricul- 

 tural papers of the country, year after year. 



As the great mass of people of that day knew nothing and 

 cared but little about pedigrees, the astute manager of the horse 

 struck an expedient in the way of advertising that was very 

 effective. He had a cut made of a horse trotting loose on the 

 road, at the rate of a hurricane, and in the background was an 

 entablature with the legend "Seventeen and a half miles an 

 hour," which anybody and everybody would interpret to mean 

 that this was a record made by imported Bellfounder, and there 

 he was doing it. This cut in reduced form went the rounds of 

 the agricultural press, and in 1831 made its appearance in the 



