100 BOARD OF AGBICULTURE. 



raise colts for profit. There is a good deal of pleasure in 

 raising a horse or two on your farm, where you enjoy the 

 society and company of horses, handling them and training 

 them ; but when you can buy a good horse, four years old, 

 and have your choice out of two or three car-loads of them, 

 grade Percherons for from $175 to $225, I do not think it 

 pays the person of whom we always speak as ' ' the average 

 farmer" to raise them for himself. It is a trade to raise 

 horses. It requires all the thought that Mr. Slade has 

 spoken about so feelingly this afternoon as being the basis of 

 success in farming. I have laid awake nights and wished 

 that some of my colts would die. (Laughter.) I did not 

 want to kill them, but I should have felt relieved in my 

 mind if they had disappeared from the fiice of the earth, so 

 that I would have no more trouble with them. 



We in Massachusetts have long and tedious winters, and 

 it is a very difiicult question to know what to do with colts 

 coming a year old and before they are two years old in the 

 winter on the farm. That was always my trouble, — how to 

 grow up a colt in the winter without fattening him. You do 

 not want to fat a horse any more than you want to fat a hired 

 man (laughter and applause) ; but they generally get fat 

 after you hire them. You want to grow a young horse and 

 make him muscular and powerful and develop him to the 

 fullest extent, and the great difficulty that I found in raising 

 my colts was to give them exercise in the winter. If you 

 turn them out to exercise themselves, you run very great 

 risk. They are very apt to injure themselves by running in 

 the cold, sharp air that stimulates them very highly, or slip- 

 ping upon ice and going against a fence in that way, and 

 making blemishes upon them that are serious defects upon a 

 horse, and always take off a great deal from his value if you 

 want to sell him. 



The Percheron horses I think as highly of as either of the 

 gentlemen who have spoken about them. As compared with 

 Morgan horses, they have the advantage of size over the 

 Morgans, but otherwise they resemble the Morgan horses of 

 thirty or forty years ago very closely indeed. They are the 

 old-fashioned Vermont Morgan horse in form, only, we will 

 say, two sizes larger. They have that same remarkable 



