154 A RUNNING-WALK 



walk," not a flat-footed one, which, as horses sometimes 

 will, his nag had inherited from some distant ancestor or 

 picked up of his own accord. No horse, except one spe- 

 cially trained, walks flat-footed more than four miles an 

 hour. The running-walk will add a mile or a mile and a 

 half to this speed. The Englishman saw no difference, 

 even if it was an amble or a rack his horse fell into ; he 

 still called it a walk, because it was neither trot nor can- 

 ter. But the flat-footed walk, the running- walk, the am- 

 ble, and the rack are all as distinct as trot and canter. 

 The English in Egypt will ride the racking donkey week 

 in, week out, and yet I never met one who knew why the 

 little fellow was so easy, or what gait he was going. They 

 will condemn in the horse what they like in the ass.. 



These so-called artificial paces are not such in fact. 

 Every horse under the excitement of the whip or of 

 fright will fall into one or other of them. Every people 

 which habitually rides at a walk i.e., travels on horse- 

 back trains the horse, by simple urging, into these paces ; 

 even the ass -colts in Southern Europe or in the Orient 

 running-walk. I have seen many a racker of true Nor- 

 man blood. You find the gaits among all sorts and con- 

 ditions of horses ; but the Southerner has caught the idea, 

 and has developed it into an art ; he has trained his sad- 

 dle-beasts to perfect paces, and has bred for their perpetu- 

 ation. These are no more artificial than the trot, which 

 is, indeed, by some of the best English authorities, pro- 

 nounced an artificial gait. The marvellous Cossack pony 

 " Seri," whom Sotnik Dmitri Peshkof rode in the winter 

 of 1890-91 across Siberia from the Pacific to St. Peters- 

 burg, five thousand five hundred miles, in one hundred and 

 ninety-three days over twenty-eight miles a day, includ- 

 ing several detentions, or thirty-seven miles per travelling 

 day, mostly on roads covered with snow - drifts was a 



