444 THE HORSE OF AMERICA. 



she was by Lexington and out of the Brawner's Eclipse mare. 

 She ran all her races under this pedigree and never was chal- 

 lenged, and if ever there was a mare in California bred in this 

 way, this is likely to be the mare. We can understand just how 

 he could have discovered where Waxy came from, and that she 

 never saw Kentucky, and on this knowledge he based the game 

 he played on poor Woodward. 



After the failure to establish the claim that Waxy came out of 

 Philip Swigert's Grey Eagle mare and publicly confessing that 

 the evidence upon which Mr. Gould and Mr. Brodhead based 

 their conclusions was fallacious and the conclusions themselves 

 incorrect, the advocates of "more running blood in the trotter" 

 pulled themselves together for another bout. What purported 

 to be an old document was dug up somewhere indeed I am told 

 there were two of them dug up, one in Kentucky and the other 

 somewhere on the Pacific coast purporting to be duplicates of an 

 agreement entered into, in March, 1864, between John P. Welch, 

 of California and Philip Swigert, of Kentucky, by which Welch 

 agreed to take certain blood horses to California and sell or breed 

 them on the shares, etc. This document possessed all the 

 paraphernalia of authenticity, with government stamp, witnesses 

 to the signatures of the contracting parties, etc. This docu- 

 ment (I don't know which "duplicate") was shown to me in 

 April, 1891, and at the first glance, and without reading a word 

 except the date, it astounded me. There was a paper purporting 

 to be twenty-seven years old, and it looked as bright and fresh as 

 though it had been written within twenty-seven hours. There 

 was no fading of the luster of the ink and there was no ageing in 

 the color of the paper. Having devoted a great deal of time to 

 the examination of writings, varying in age from one day to a 

 hundred years and more, and this experience extending through 

 many years, I ought to be a fairly competent judge of the effects 

 of age on ink and paper. Here was a paper purporting to be 

 over a quarter of a century old with all the newness of yesterday, 

 and when Mr. J. C. Simpson showed it to me I was impressed 

 with the belief, on this one point of evidence alone, that it was 

 spurious, and that Mr. Simpson had been made a victim by some 

 rascally scrivener. With so much for the appearance of the paper, 

 on its face, we will now examine the contents and see whether 

 any evidence can there be found that will throw further light on 

 the question of its authenticity. Unfortunately I have not what 



