94 The Book of the Horse. 



for obtaining speed and quality in their ordinary horses upon crosses of the Enghsh blood-horse. 

 An American writer on breeding trotting-horses says, "When we find our stock want courage, we 

 take a cross of the thoroughbred horse." The best racing stock in the country traces its 

 descent from Sir C. Banbury's Diomed, winner of the first English Derby, who was subsequently 

 imported into Virginia, where he lived to a great age, and became the progenitor of many 

 excellent sons and daughters. 



The preference the Americans have for harness over riding-horses would, of course, influence 

 their selection of stallions. 



The following extracts from a letter addressed to the most literary of the sporting newspapers 

 giyes a picturesque and exact account of the racing of the day in New York, by a very competent 

 observer and reporter : — 



A VISIT TO JERO.ME PARK. 



"A warm, sunny autumn morning was Saturday, the 15th of October. Carriages were 

 pouring up Fifth Avenue and away through the Central Park for the races, and our drag 

 was at the door of the Union Club, waiting for Mr. Lawrence Jerome to mount the box and 

 tool us there also. A strange drive is this to Jerome Park — pleasant enough round the winding 

 roads of the beautiful Central Park — but a little less pleasant, if more exciting, for the rest of 

 the journey. The scene is like, yet very unlike, the road to Epsom on a Derby Day. The 

 dust is there, and so are the carriages, but the motley mob, made up of costermongers and 

 publicans, is not. In place of these characteristic representatives of London life are innumerable 

 luiman beings mounted on fragile-looking vehicles running on two and four wheels, and dragged 

 by one or two horses. These are the ' trottists,' and the drivers thereof are whirled through 

 the air at the rate of seventeen miles an hour. Their minds are in an apparent state of painful 

 tension, with eyes starting from their sockets, legs planted firmly and widely apart forward, a 

 rein twisted round each hand ; a frightened woman on the off seat clutching nervously at the 

 iron rail, and in momentary fear for the fate of her waterfall and bonnet ; and so the controller 

 of this strange spectacle hurries on. He has a frantic ambition to pass everything that can 

 be passed on the road, and if he succeeds in doing this, he has achieved something worth living 

 and driving a ' trottist ' for. Tliis mode of moving about, when assigned to its proper place 

 and time, is said to have fascinations not to be resisted after once it has been indulged in ; 

 but I imagine that it is not every Englishman who would care to make the acquaintance of 

 this inexpressible charm. Fortunately, in the Central Park policemen are stationed to regulate 

 the speed of all vehicles to seven miles an hour, and their duties are almost as light as the 

 solitary one of those policemen who are stationed in Broadway to seize the arms of ladies and 

 convey them safely over the crossings ; for be it understood that no one attempts railway speed 

 in the pleasant defiles of the park, and the driving there is as sedate as it is on the road by 

 the side of Rotten Row on a June afternoon. 



Soon the piazza around the club-house is filled by one of the gayest throngs of beauty a 

 race-going man ever gazed upon. I will not say that these American ladies are more beautiful, 

 or more dressed, or that they talk better, than Engli.sh ladies ; but they are beautiful, their 

 dress is such as would inspire the literary milliner of the Court Tattler, and their talk must 

 be brilliant — it is listened to so devoutly. Jerome Park did not exactly accord with my 

 English ideas of a park, neither did the Central Park ; both are beautiful in their way, and 

 each is certainly unique. The ' Central ' may have the finest carriage-drive in the world, as 

 the guide-book says it has, or even in the United States, or in New York, and may have 

 cost ten millions of dollars ; still it does not look like a park, any more than the parade at 



