132 SPORTING STORIES 



He imported two first-rate thoroughbreds, Emigrant and 

 Rainbow, of which my correspondent in Sydney gives me 

 these particulars : — " Rainbow did nothing here worthy of 

 note, but Emigrant has left his mark on our thoroughbreds 

 to an extent that stamps him as the greatest horse ever 

 imported into New South Wales. Emigrant is a household 

 word with breeders here ; and one of his descendants, 

 Yattendon, was the sire of perhaps a greater number of 

 celebrated horses than any horse we have ever had." 



Of the superiority of the English thoroughbred over the 

 Arab in the matter of speed there is no doubt whatever ; 

 but those who believe in the Arabian horse still maintain 

 that in staying power he is not to be surpassed, and I am 

 not aware that the English thoroughbred has ever proved 

 his superiority in any real test of stamina. There was a 

 match at Cairo on the 25th September 1853, for ^^350 a 

 side, between an Arab and a thoroughbred English mare 

 over a distance of gf miles — 4 miles 7 furlongs out and in — 

 which resulted in the victory of the Arab, who did the run 

 out in 15! minutes and the run home in 11^ minutes: 27^ 

 minutes for the gf miles — at least, so it is said. But there 

 was a general impression among the Englishmen present 

 that the mare would have won if she had not swerved 

 about a mile from home, and her jockey in trying to turn 

 her was upset into a cane fence. However, the fact 

 remains that the Arab did win. 



At the time of George Osbaldeston's death, when the 

 subject of his great 200 miles ride at Newmarket cropped 

 up in the newspapers, a colonel on the Bengal retired 

 list gave some remarkable particulars of combined human 

 and equine endurance, in which the Arab figured promi- 

 nently. 



"I believe," writes the colonel, "that Captain Home 

 of the Madras Horse Artillery rode 200 miles on Arab 

 horses in less than ten hours on the road between Madras 

 and Bangalore. If so, considering the slower speed of 

 Arabs, the climate of India, and the ride along a high 

 road instead of round a good race-course upon some of the 

 best English horses, I think you will allow Captain Home's 

 performance to have been fully equal to the Squire's. 



