418 'i"HK HOK8E. 



These garae animals, supported by their blood alone, and the 

 iron hardness peculiar to the bones and muscles of thoroughbreds 

 — many of them, the leaders especially, little weedy-looking 

 screws— did it, day after day, at a rattling gallop, except now 

 and then up some unusually steep ascent, when they were pulled 

 into a trot, comparatively uninjured. They were, of course, 

 well fed, well groomed, well housed, and well driven ; and by 

 well, I mean not only bountifully and carefully, but judiciously. 

 But there was the daily distance to be done ; it had to be done, 

 and it was done, in spite of roads or weather — unless it were 

 floods or snowdrifts — and I have often seen them so little the 

 worse for the rating gallop of seven or eight miles in five 

 and twenty minutes, with three or four tons at their heels, that 

 they would bite at one another in play, when unhitched, and 

 canter off to the stables with all their harness rattling about 

 them, before the new team was in their places. 



That speed the people demanded, at that time ; and it had 

 to be effected— that it was effected, was the consequence of 

 there being thoroughbreds in England, sufficiently numerous 

 and sufficiently cheap to be applied to coaching purposes. 



It is useless to decry the advantages of speedy travel, in 

 these days, when men will travel, at the risk of incurring actual 

 peril of life and limb— if they travel far and frequently— equal 

 to that faced by a soldier in active service, in the fastest and 

 most insecure of railroads and steamboats. And it is just as 

 absurd to decry the utility of speed in horse-flesh, which is 

 not incompatible with perfect security, as it were to maintain 

 that slow trains are perferable to fast ones, and that it is better 

 to cross the Atlantic in thirty days than in ten or eleven. 



For if it be as good, or better, it is evident that peo^^le will 

 not do it. 



And just as well may we expect a traveller purposely to se- 

 lect a slow steamer for an ocean transit, as to drive a slow horse 

 and a bad traveller, when he can drive or ride one that rattles 

 him off his fourteen or sixteen miles in an hour, with ease to 

 himself, and pleasure to his owner. 



It is a utilitarian maxim of the age that time is money ; a 

 maxim which we hear most earnestly insisted on by the anti- 

 race-horse, anti-trial-of-speed, anti-every-sort-of-amusement pha- 



