VIU 



PREFACE 



one who understood horses and dogs and loved them, 

 a true "sport," not averse to a "scrap," and with a 

 particular fondness for Boston terriers. " I like a 

 little sand," he used to say, " be it in man or dog." He 

 died, as he would have wished, from the kick of a 

 horse — not a vicious kick, I hasten to say, but a kick 

 playfully intended for a fellow-steed. 



It is among such men that one most often finds the 

 true lover of the horse. Your real horse-lover is not, 

 as a rule, the owner of many horses, but the attend- 

 ant of one; not the master-truckman with fifty or a 

 hundred horses In his stable, but the humble teamster 

 who drives and looks after a single horse or a pair; 

 not the rich patron of the turf who maintains a costly 

 stable of runners or trotters, but the impecunious 

 " swipe " who shares a box-stall with the horse com- 

 mitted to his charge, and is at once his servant, his 

 nurse, his valet, his confidant, and his faithful friend. 

 Whatever their faults may be, and they are not with- 

 out faults, these men have a spark of that divine 

 affection which is the essence of Christianity, and which, 

 if It should ever become an universal feeling among 

 men, would unite all animals, the human and the non- 

 human, In one brotherhood, and would transform this 

 blood-stained earth Into a near approach to Paradise. 



March, igij, H. C. M. 



