222 TRAINING THE TROTTING HORSE. 



The amount of work will, of course, differ with 

 different colts. Xo two can be worked exactly alike, 

 and here will come in play the natural fitness of the 

 trainer. If he is by nature fitted for a trainer, his own 

 perceptions, or we might say his instinct, will teach 

 him how to discriminate between different colts — to 

 see where one requires to be handled a httle differently 

 from another, whether b\^ reason of size, temper, or 

 natural capacity. The trouble with the great majority 

 of men who handle trotting-horses is that they are not 

 thinkers but imitators. They saw Dan Mace or Budd 

 Doble or John Splan do something with a certain 

 horse, and the}^ go right home and do it with their 

 horses, under the impression that because a famous 

 driver does it with one horse it is necessaril}^ just the 

 thing for all horses. No mere imitator can do anything 

 intelligently, much less train horses, because to work 

 intelligently he must understand the reason for ever}^- 

 thing he does. Doing a thing that you saw somebody 

 else do without your knowing why he did it is just 

 about as wise as taking a certain sort of medicine 

 because it is taken by somebody else, whose disease you 

 do not know the nature of. There were never, proba- 

 bly, two horses in the world to which full justice could be 

 done by treating them exactl}^ alike. No cast-iron rules 

 can be laid down ; they must be taken as elastic enough 

 to admit of modification to meet the requirements of 

 thousands of different cases. So, while I am explain- 

 ing in these chapters what we might call the average 

 procedure at Palo Alto, defining the general principles 

 and methods, and approximating as nearly as it can be 

 approximated a course of training that can be advan- 



