94 CANADIAN TURF RECOLLECTIONS 



A STOEY ABOUT THE LATE CHARLES GATES. 



Away back in the olden days, when Charley Littlefield 

 and Charles Gates were young and lively as kittens, the 

 following circumstance is related to have happened : 



Charles Gates was at Georgetown races with one or 

 two runners, and during the meet he stumbled across an 

 old peddler whose ostensible occupation was trading 

 soap for ashes. His rig was an old springless cart, drawn 

 by a small bay mare that looked as if she had gathered 

 on her tail and mane about as many burrs as could be 

 collected in one township. The harness was of free and 

 easy style, pieced out with shoe laces and string. In a 

 word, the general verdict of an outsider would have been 

 that the whole institution, driver and all, had been struck 

 by a hurricane and got badly broken up. The boss of the 

 rig was a long, lean, lank, lantern-jawed down-easter, 

 whose chief occupation at the hotel where he was stop- 

 ping was drinking whiskey and emitting tobacco juice. 



After loading himself with a tolerable cargo of whiskey 

 he started talking horse with Charles Gates, leading with 

 the assertion that "Ye never see no fast running horses 

 now-a-days," he yarned about a mare he once owned 

 that could outrun anything ever foaled. Warming with 

 his recollection of the old mare, he went on talking about 

 a youngster out of her that he was driving, that was ' ' all 

 powerful smart on its feet and could run mighty slick." 

 The telling of the story evoked a hurricane of laughter, 

 which seemed to rile the old 'un, and by this time the 

 pendulistic motion of his body when he essayed to walk 

 and the thickness of his speech proclaimed him to be two 

 sheets in the wind and the third one fluttering. Nothing 

 would satisfy him, however, but to stagger out to the 

 barn and bring around the mare to be inspected by the 

 company. 



