402 THE HORSE OF AMERICA. 



He says: "To old Shales and Useful Cub the Isle of Ely, Cam- 

 bridgeshire and Norfolk are indebted for their fame in the pro- 

 duction of capital Hackneys." Useful Cub was bred by Thomas 

 Jenkinson, of Long Sutton in Lincolnshire, and was foaled about 

 1865-70, and was got- by a Suffolk cart horse, doubtless a light 

 weight, and his dam was by Golden Farmer, a son of the famous 

 half-bred Sampson, that was the great-grandsire of Messenger 

 and beat most of the best horses of his day. Mr. Lawrence knew 

 Useful Cub well, and was beaten by him in Hyde Park. 'Ws 

 have no details of this horse's performances, but it seems to be 

 conceded that he trotted fifteen, sixteen and seventeen miles in 

 the hour. Old Shales, or Scott's Shales, as he is sometimes 

 called, is described by Lawrence as "the bastard son of Blank," 

 son of Godolphin Arabian, but Mr. Euren, the compiler of the 

 Hackney Stud Book maintains that he was the son of Blaze and 

 not the son of Blank. The reasons given for this change I do 

 not remember, but they would have to be well founded before I 

 could throw overboard the contemporaneous evidence of Mr. 

 Lawrence. It will not do to say that Mr. Lawrence mistook the 

 name Blaze for Blank and so wrote it by mistake, for he knew 

 all about both horses. This distinction, however, is of but little 

 practical value. The horses Shales and Useful Cub were both fast 

 and successful trotters, in their day, and they both became dis- 

 tinguished sires of trotters. By this I do not mean that they 

 were the sires of all the trotters, for there were many that were 

 wholly unknown in their breeding. 



Judging from the numbers of leading contests that were re- 

 ported in the Sporting Magazine and. other publications, we must 

 conclude that trotting contests reached their height as well in 

 numbers as in public interest about the last decade in the last 

 century. The contests were all to saddle, on the road, and the 

 leading ones were made under the watch and over a long distance 

 of ground, specifying such or such a distance to be made inside 

 of an hour. To form a correct estimate of the speed of those 

 horses, I will copy one paragraph, entire, from the description 

 given by Mr. Lawrence concerning his own mare Betty Bloss: 



"My own brown rnare, known by the name of Betty Bloss, was the slowest 

 of all the capital trotters, but at five years old trotted fifteen miles in ODD 

 hour, carrying fourteen stone, although fairly mistress of no more than ten. 

 She afterward trotted sixteen miles within the hour, with ten stone, with 

 much ease to herself and her rider. She was nearly broken down at four 



