FOUNDER OF HIS RACE 43 



hills and mounted them with a dash of spirited flight, as 

 if she joyed in their difficulties." 



True recalled his mother's admiration of his father, 

 and his heart beat gratefully at these words. He, too, 

 remembered Gipsey's poetic motion, her rhythmic step, as 

 if she trod an even melody, and her willingness to take 

 a hill. 



"As his name is, so is he, 

 If you believe not, come and see !'' 



So The Hartford Courant described Beautiful Bay, and 

 the rhyme was a by-word about the town — for they were 

 very proud of Beautiful Bay in Hartford. It was not 

 long before True heard the couplet in the stables, and 

 right proud was he to be the son of so praised a father. 



Beautiful Bay told True many stirring tales in the 

 quiet nights they spent so close together, for the older 

 horse had ever been a "soldier of Fortune" and his Hfe 

 one of constant change and excitement. 



It was a great boast for a horse to say he had been 

 bred in the De Lancey stables, for those De Lanceys, 

 like Mahommed, had been lovers of horses, and their 

 stables and half-mile running track, in the centre of what 

 was so soon to be the very heart of the great city of 

 New York, was the finest in the Northern Colonies be- 

 fore the War of the Revolution. 



Gay blades were those De Lanceys, and their rightful 

 inheritance was the sporting blood of old England, though 

 they were, after all, part Huguenot, part Dutch, by an- 

 cestry. 



Colonel De Lancey, True Briton's first owner, had mar- 

 ried a Mitsress Van Courtlandt, whose family had a King 

 and a Bishop at their backs, and occupied half the im- 

 portant posts under the crown. He was a rollicking, 

 generous, reckless gentleman, at home alike in drawing- 



