ILLVSTRATED GUIDE. 79 



tbem. But open-heeled shoes leave the frog entirely ex- 

 posed to very large stones and are the cause of many a 

 severe bruise to the maricular joint, which lays the foun- 

 dation of future incurable lameness. Another great ad- 

 vantage of bringing in the heels and fitting the shoe close, 

 is the certainty that the horse will not cast his shoe. You 

 leave nothing for stiff ground to lay hold of and if you 

 slightly bevel the inside quarter and heel of the shoe 

 from the foot downward, as is sometimes done to prevent 

 a horse cutting, no ground in the world can pull it off, 

 for the foot, expanding to the weight of the horse, enlarg- 

 es the hole made by the shoe, and leaves more space for 

 the shoe to come out of than it made for itself to go in at; 

 but if the shoe projects beyond the hoof at any part-, and 

 more particularly at the heels, the foot cannot fill the 

 hole made by the shoe, and stiff clay will cling round the 

 projection and pull the shoe off. Having so far finished 

 the shoe, place it on the face of the anvil with the toe 

 hanging over the side, and see that the foot surface of 

 the quarter and heels, are quite level ; then make it hot 

 enough to scorch the hoof all round and form a bed for 

 itself. Without this it would be next to impossible to 

 insure close fitting. After you have made the foot as 

 level as you can with the rasp, and the shoe as level as 

 you can on the anvil, the chances are very much against 

 their fitting like two planed boards, as they ought to do; 

 and the quantity of horn to be thus removed is so small 

 as not to be worth thinking about. It is a mistake to 

 suppose that a hot shoe injures the hoof; it does noth- 

 ing of the kind and you cannot possibly fit a shoe prop- 

 erly without making it hot. I would not have you burn 

 a shoe into its place on the foot before you had taken care 



