220 CANADIAN TURF RECOLLECTIONS 



AN OLD-TIME FORTY-MILE TROT. 



There is no getting over the fact that Canadians, as a 

 people, are as fond of sport as their ancestors across the 

 herring pond. 



True, we have not a wealthy class that can afford to 

 lavish its tens of thousands a year in providing sport for 

 the gratification of the public taste, but what our citizens 

 lack in ducats is made up in enthusiasm and you can wit- 

 ness as much enjoyment at a roadside race for a ten- 

 dollar note as you would see on Epsom Downs when 

 twenty thoroughbreds sweep past the winning post. I 

 have seen our country cousins shout themselves hoarse 

 over a horse that couldn't run his mile in better than 

 2.10, and I have heard the same fraternity yell like a 

 Comanchee in honor of a plug that struggled through a 

 heat in three minutes. Women will flirt and men will 

 sport and bet their money on the bobtail, or some other 

 kind, and all the straight-laced exhorters that ever cried 

 themselves hoarse in pulpit or market-place cannot talk 

 it out. Man has a certain amount of cussedness about 

 him and when I meet a chap fond of rolling his eyes on 

 the upstroke and crossing his hands in orthodox shape, I 

 put him down as being ''on the make." What his par- 

 ticular little game may be I perhaps have to find out, but 

 it is a thoroughbred against a poodle that he has some 

 kind of a game in hand and is only lying low for a chance 

 to ''open out." Having thus spoken a few words of 

 gospel truth, I jump back to my text refreshed by the 

 digression. 



The old-time trotter is apt to be considered by modem 

 turfites an old fogy that could not trot fast enough to keep 

 himself warm. Yet the blood of these old stagers, judici- 

 ously mated, has produced the present marvellous flyer, 

 the measure of whose capabilities has not yet been mark- 

 ed upon a blackboard; still, though, the old folks couldn't 



