ii8 



Ophelia was the dam of Falcon and Gray Eagle and but 

 little is known of what she did on the track as a performer. 

 Her claim to distinction lies in her produce, which was 

 numerous. 



Grisette traces back to the Dance family, and produced 

 some good animals. She was only a fair performer. 



The majority of the grays that have been trained proved 

 good horses, and there are few of the color that have proved 

 to be total failures. They are noted for their consistency as 

 performers and for their remarkable speed and endurance. 

 There has hardly been one of them that could not go any 

 distance and always be depended upon to do his or her level 

 best. 



The general opinion is that this gray color was obtained 

 from early Arabian crosses, and on the desert it was much 

 sought after by the Bedouins, who needed speed more than 

 anything else in their marauding trips across the arid plains. 

 A great many of the Arabs were nearly milk-white, with 

 black spots. Fysall, the last importation by Keene Richards, 

 of Georgetown, Ky., came from Arabia and was as white as 

 snow, with a few black spots cropping out here and there. 

 He was never trained and came here as a stallion for the 

 brood farm. It is claimed for this animal that he was the 

 purest of all the Arabs, but he did not succeed to any extent. 

 Mr. Richards spent five years in Arabia learning the Ara- 

 bian language, so as to be able to understand and talk with 

 the sheiks of the desert, in order to get the very best of the 

 animals they had. The natives were so enraged that, when 

 he started to leave with his purchases, they followed him 

 across the desert and made him give up some of the horses 

 he had bought. 



The most probable cause for the decline of the gray 

 horse is the breeding and intermixing with the more pre- 

 dominant colors, such as browns, bays and blacks. Thus the 

 further that we breed away from the Arab the further we 

 go toward extinguishing this color. Now and then one 

 crops out that bears the pale hue, but they are few and far 

 between, and the tendency is toward the ending of this color 

 as race horses. I do not mean by this that there are no gray 

 horses amountmg to anything on the turf, but only seek to 

 show that he is not so numerous as he was at one time 



