1894.] TRANSACTIONS. 21 



therefore current. We have no longer Cattle-Shows : they have 

 been transmuted into Agricultural Fairs, — too often Fouls! 

 That man is accounted behind the times whose memory reverts 

 with pleasure to the Common and its general enjoyment, where 

 all were welcome to a public annual Holiday ; — the one with his 

 quiver full as free from an onerous charge for admission as the 

 youth at whom Cupid had just aimed. Where the side-shows 

 tickled the groundlings, fooling even them but once ; where 

 there need be none of that fretful worry about the weather, since 

 sunshine and shekels were not equivalent and the Governor 

 could be counted upon to exhibit himself from interest in the 

 cause and not for reasons of policy. We have lost our Cattle- 

 Shows and in lieu thereof have the Half-Mile Track, the Fifty 

 Thousand Dollar Debt ; the weary despair of extrication from 

 liabilities that, if achieved, would only furnish a new pretext for 

 the imposition of additional burdens to stimulate and foster a 

 practice confessedly hopeless, unless the Statutes can be altered 

 so as to tolerate gambling. Conceding all that the wildest en- 

 thusiast may demand to the innate nobility of the Horse ! Yet 

 it is not as he is described in Job that he is paraded as a specta- 

 cle at an Agricultural Hippodrome. Who can detect a "neck 

 clothed in thunder" when the mane is sheared, the hair clipped, 

 the tail docked, and the feet clamped in boots ! The whole pre- 

 tence that the modern trials of speed conduce to an improvement 

 in the breed is dissipated, when you reflect that, oftener than 

 not, the competitors are geldings, and that invariably every pos- 

 sible appliance and trick is employed to gain even the slightest 

 advantage. From all the racing counties of England comes up 

 the universal wail that production of Horse-FIesh tends to de- 

 grade and ruin all concerned in it. In this doleful cry farm- 

 steads and grange concur, as in nothing else, that, since the 

 latter-day cult of devotion to pedigree, and servitude to unnat- 

 ural speed, of two animals at either end of the halter one may be 

 a horse, but the other is invariably and inevitably an ass ! 



I may be old-fashioned in my notions, but I honestly date the 

 decline in New England Farming, far more than from any or all 

 other causes combined, from the surrender of the Ox and the 

 3 



