80 WEIGHT TELLS ACCORDING TO CIRCUMSTANCES. 



ther. With some, 7 Ib. would do it to a certainty, 

 while in another case, even a stone would not be too 

 much, enormous as the addition would be with horses 

 of the same year : but even with race-horses, to whom 

 weight is of much greater import than with any other, 

 the effect of additional weight depends greatly I 

 will not say entirely, though it is very near it on 

 the weight previously put up. Match Alice Haw- 

 thorn with a good fair strong slowish horse at 8st. 

 each, you may bet 50 to 1 in ponies, and give a man 

 10 sovs. to make the bet ; put 9st. or lOst. on them, 

 she would win, or we will suppose she would ; make 

 it twelve, the slow one becomes, not, as the saying 

 is, a horse of another colour, but a horse of quite 

 different qualifications, and possibly would win 

 easy. 



We will suppose a lot of three-year-olds running 

 together, carrying (we will say) 8st. and 8st.31b. We 

 have a pretty close race with three of them, a good 

 fourth, and a respectable fifth, the others tailed off. 

 We may naturally infer, that, supposing all to have 

 been fit to go on the day, and that no particular event 

 happened during the race to any of them, the winning 

 horse and second were the two fastest horses : they 

 were most undoubtedly the fastest in that race, at 

 that weight, run as that race was, and at that par- 

 ticular distance, say a mile and a half; but as animals, 

 it is by no means impossible that one of the not placed 

 may in him or herself be by far the fastest of the lot ; 

 that little mystic gentleman weight, without any of the 

 confederacy or sleight of hand of the Wizard of the 

 North, would (perhaps merely by a little subtraction 

 or addition of vulgar human flesh or shot, which stops 

 race-horses as well as partridges) make as great a 



