INTRODUCTION 



TIMES have changed indeed since one of 

 those books so delightful to a child with 

 a love of country life — a book filled with 

 brilliantly coloured but altogether impossible 

 pictures of animals, and with exaggerated letter- 

 press — ^told us, in the words I have adopted as 

 a motto that '' the Horse is a noble animal and 

 the friend of man/' In early Railway days, and 

 for many years after the country became a net- 

 work of railways, the horse was economically of as 

 much importance as ever. The more work there 

 was for the railway to do, the more work there 

 was for its active partner, the horse. In the 

 nineteenth century and nearly down to the end 

 of it the horse — ^by which I mean more especially 

 the light horse — could not be done without. Now 

 we are told that he can be done without ; he is 

 less in evidence in our streets ; the motor omnibus 

 and the taxi-cab come more into use every year 

 and ' slay their slain ' with the cool indifference 

 of a twentieth-century Moloch, and the man who 

 forgets that the first requisite for a prophet is 



