HORSES. 155 



were bought in Vermont, aud also for the artillery. They 

 were carefully selected Morgans, and the officers declared that 

 they were equal to the best English troop horses. Until about 

 1858, the express companies in Boston and New York were 

 supplied with Morgan horses of superb quality. These horses 

 were of a type well remembered by horsemen, — high crests, 

 thin withers, well set, lean heads, short backs, round barrels, 

 clean legs, with powerful hocks, good feet and steady tempers. 

 Farmers bred them with certainty. There was no money 

 wasted in track-handling, and the colts were not hammered to 

 pieces to show speed when their constitutions were half-formed. 

 Everybody wanted such horses then, as they do now, and they 

 put money into the farmers' purses. 



Breeding in-and-in, selling the best and largest of the mares, 

 and failure to replenish the fountain of thorough-blood, from 

 which the race sprung, were the causes of their decline, so 

 that to-day the name of Morgan has no spell to conjure with ; 

 nor has the family an existence, except in the fervid imagina- 

 tion of some stallion owners. 



Of late years, the only idea of the breeder has been to get 

 "a fast trotter." All other virtues have been overlooked. 

 Failing to strike upon this accidental quality, he has been left 

 with a "scrub," upon whose "handling" twice the value of a 

 good horse has perhaps been spent. 



We are thus overrun with trotters that cannot trot ; or if 

 they have been forced up to a factitious speed, they have not 

 blood enough to "stay," and must be put into the category of 

 failures. While we are thus supplied with what no one wants, 

 never was there such a scarcity of fine coach-horses as now. 

 A dealer looking for matched horses, a well-made, fast-walking 

 saddle-horse, a powerful, quick horse for a coupe or T cart, 

 or horses used for park tandems, or the class of high-bred 

 animals able to take a heavy four-in-hand coach from Madison 

 Square to Jerome Park, might search New England in vain 

 for them. At the same time he could buy droves of light- 

 muscled, coarse-headed, flat-ribbed, round-legged creatures, 

 whose puffs and sprung knees tell of the vain attempts 

 that have been made to "develop speed" for a mile. Fail- 

 ing in this, they have no quality that fits them for genteel 

 service. 



