HOW THE TROTTIKG HORSE IS BRED. 545 



And who will say this is not a righteous retribution for the disrep- 

 utable means employed, first and last, to obtain this control? 



My life-work in building up a breed of trotting horses and 

 thereby adding many millions to the value of the horse stock of 

 the country had been more effective than I had even hoped for. 

 I knew that I had laid the foundation on the bed-rock of truth, 

 and I knew that the superstructure had been honestly erected, 

 but I did not know what a deep root my teachings had taken in 

 the minds of all intelligent and thinking men. In transferring 

 the property the chief source of my unhappiness was in the 

 thought that heaven an$ earth would be moved to destroy what 

 I had done and overthrow what I had taught. But I had 

 builded wiser and stronger than I knew, and when the "feather- 

 weights" were hired to pull the house down and tear up the very 

 roots of the seed I had planted, the people would not listen to 

 them and nobody would read their vapid utterances. And thus 

 the effort ended in the death of the Monthly. The harvest of 

 thought was much nearer the reaping time when the transfer was 

 made than I had supposed, and since then it has been ripening 

 and ripening, and to-day if any man were heard advocating more 

 running blood in the trotter, he would with very great unanimity 

 be pronounced either an ignoramus or a fool, on that question at 

 least. 



But, much as I disliked to surrender my life-work to a man 

 whose moral fiber I had tested and found brittle, the transfer 

 was really "a blessing in disguise." It gave me rest, it gave me 

 health, and it gave me leisure to prosecute the study of the horse 

 of history in fields hitherto untrodden. The years thus employed 

 in digging after the very roots of history in the libraries, at home 

 and abroad, have glided by, affording a continuous enjoyment in 

 the discovery of many things that are very old and yet entirely 

 new to this generation. Very often, when the work went slowly, 

 I thought I could again hear the quiet, sympathetic voice of a 

 Pennsylvania Friend gently prompting me with the remark, 

 "Thee should remember that thee is no longer a young man." 

 And now that my long-promised and pleasant undertaking is 

 completed, it is my very earnest wish that the thousand friends 

 who have been waiting for it may enjoy the pleasant surprises it 

 will furnish them as much as I have enjoyed their exhumation 

 xfrom the archives of long-buried centuries. 



