194 ROAD, TRACK, AND STABLE. 



High-steppers, or park or sensation horses, as they 

 are sometimes called, stand by themselves, — in a 

 small and very expensive class. Their gait is not 

 merely, or even chiefly, a means of locomotion, — it is 

 an end in itself ; and very pretty is the effect of their 

 peculiar up-and-down step, especially when they are 

 driven at a slow trot, with all the accessories of a fine 

 equipage. They travel as if they had springs in their 

 hoofs, their knees at the upward stroke seeming al- 

 most to touch the musical, well burnished pole chains 

 with which they are often and most suitably har- 

 nessed. The high-stepper expresses, so far as a horse 

 can do it, the insolence of wealth. In his prime he 

 would furnish a good text for a sermon, and in his 

 decay he might point the moral of a pathetic tale. 



These horses are distinctly for show, not for use. 

 " You may drive your steppers," one authority re- 

 marks, " very slowly for the most part, and fast a 

 short distance, if they shine in a fast trot, for two 

 hours or so every day; but if you want to go ten 

 miles out of town and back, you must fall back on a 

 useful pair, or hire post horses." 



The best of our sensation horses come from Maine, 

 perhaps because its stony pastures tend to make the 

 horses that run in them step high. The deep snows 

 which prevail during the long winter in that latitude 

 probably have a similar effect. A man wading through 

 snow steps uncommonly high, and it is the same with 

 a horse. Ten years ago a really high-stepping carriage 

 horse was almost unknown in this country, but we 

 raise many of them now ; the demand partly causing 

 the supply to exist, and partly calling it forth 'from 

 its hiding place where it existed before. A " Down 



