30 THOROUGH-BRED HORSE, &C. 



half-bred horse; which latter is generally under- 

 stood to be a horse tolerably well ; or, indeed, 

 he may perhaps be very near thorough-bred. 

 But then, this horse is bred so, more by chance 

 than by any premeditated design of the breeder 

 to breed such a horse for any other purpose than 

 that of making him a hunter; and if the owner 

 finds that the horse he has bred has pretty good 

 speed, he may perhaps enter him to run for a 

 hunter's stakes, in the neighbourhood in which 

 such a horse may have been hunted, and he is 

 thereby qualified to start in a race with other 

 horses that are much on a par with himself. But, 

 to allow a good cock-tail horse to be entered 

 into such a race as this, would be bad judgment, 

 unless he was heavily weighted ; for he is, in every 

 respect, so very closely connected with that of 

 the thorough-bred race horse, that he would most 

 likely, not only beat nearly all the half-bred 

 horses he may be running with, but he may oc- 

 casionally beat some very fair thorough-bred ones, 

 with which he may have to run. 



