BELLFOUJ^DER. 123 



IMPORTED BELLFOUNDER. 



In the equine history of this country the horse of controversy has. 

 been Bellfounder. He has been the source of more conflicting opin- 

 ions than any other. By one class he has been over-estimated; by 

 another he has been totally under-estimated; by another he has, 

 furthermore, been willfully misrepresented. It is clear that he has not 

 been properly understood by either class. He had great merit, and 

 has transmitted but a part of it, and has not received the credit due 

 him for the part he has transmitted. He secured reputation to others 

 when they were not entitled to it from any excellences they possessed 

 not derived from him. He possessed elements of demerit that were 

 not understood by his friends or defamers, and which stood in the way 

 of his greatest success and yet operate to detract from the usefulness 

 of those possessing strains of his blood. He was an uncertain horse 

 to cross on other strains of blood. 



To his credit, be it said, his most earnest friends and most ardent 

 admirers were those who knew him best, while those who would 

 lightly esteem him knew but little of him; and it may be said of him- 

 who has been his chief defamer and assailant, that he actually under- 

 stood nothing of either the merits of the horse or the peculiar qual- 

 ities that entered into his composition, which gave him his renown or 

 stood in the way of his success. With this one, blind and willful preju- 

 dice was the guiding star. To such an extent was he willing to 

 carry his detraction, that in the face of living and reputable men who 

 knew the horse well, while in the early and palmy days of his career, 

 and w^ho had intimate personal knowledge of the facts relative to his 

 purchase in England, his importation to this country, the day of his 

 arrival, the ship in which he was imported, the persons in whose 

 custody he was placed, and all the facts of his career of twenty years 

 in this country, this intelligent organ of popiilar instruction on the 

 subject of the horse was ready to deny that Bellfounder was an 

 imported horse, and to assert that he was a spurious Kanuck. For 

 the furtherance of this aimless detraction, after the horse had been 

 dead nearly forty years, this same oracle of equine history caused a 

 search to be made at the reputed port of importation, for the bottom 

 facts relating to the imposition that had been practiced on the Ameri- 

 can people, in the matter of the fable of the Norfolk trotter, and 

 when the individual thus commissioned furnished the indubitable 



