EASTERN HORSES. 81 



to pulling up from speed and turning quickly. The 

 better* the horse the more adapted to all feats of agility 

 and strength. No horse can compare with the English, 

 no horse is more easily broken in to anything and every- 

 thing — and there is no quality in which the English horse 

 does not excel, no performance in which he cannot beat 

 all competition." Gammon ! This is strong language and 

 saYors of partiality rather than prejudice, for further 

 on he extols Eastern in preference to English horses. 



The captain goes on the Irishman's principle that one 

 horse 'Ms as good as another and a great deal better," for 

 he proceeds as follows : ^* An officer in India made a bet 

 that he would himself ride his charger (an Arab, little 

 more than fourteen hands high) four hundred measured 

 miles in five consecutive days, and he won the match. 

 The horse performed his task with ease, and did not even 

 throw out a windfall. General Dumas relates that the 

 horses of the Sahara will travel during five or six days 

 from seventy-five to ninety miles a day, and that in 

 twenty-four hours they will go over from one hundred 

 and fifty to one hundred and eighty miles, and this over 

 a stony desert. Diseases of the feet and broken-wind are 

 almost unknown amonsr them. What would become of 

 an English cavalry regiment if suddenly required to 

 make a few forced marches or to keep up a pursuit for a 

 few hundred miles ? Their want of power to carry the 

 wei2:ht and want of brcedins^ makes them tire after trot- 

 ting a few miles on the line of march. 



*^ Our cavalry horses are feeble ; they measure high, 

 but do so from length of limb, which is weakness, not 

 power. The blood they require is not that of our weedy 

 race horse (an animal more akin to the greyhound and 

 bred for speed alone), but it is the blood of the Arab and 



♦The word "better" has a wide raiisjc. Tliere is no horse of any breed or 

 conntry that is not " better" for sonic things than others are, and in our opinion 

 Nolan uses the word at random. 



