SEVENTY DOLLARS. 



In 1895, at Lexington, when the bottom was clean 

 out of the trotting business, a son of the "Green Isle" 

 who had emigrated to the "Blue Grass" when a boy, drift- 

 ing naturally into the breeding business — and when the 

 "pinch" came, made the inevitable "dispersal" sale — there 

 was offered in his three-quarter starved consignment a 

 rakish two-year-old dark bay filly, sharp of withers, 

 deep through the heart, rather flat ribbed — in short, of the 

 Lady Thorne type. The hair on her was inches long, her 

 tail, though long and rather light, was carried right, and 

 she was of tissue-paper thinness. You could almost blow 

 your breath through her, and in the strong sunlight she 

 would have to stand twice in one place to make a shadow. 

 "That's the best filly that stands in Kentucky," asserted 

 her breeder, and the audience smiled with incredulity. 

 Up and down the sale stable she stepped; clean, clipper- 

 gaited and true. She was so awfully poor though, that 

 no one wanted her. She was not fashionably, yet well 

 bred, being by an obscure son of Young Jim, whose dam 

 was a thoroughbred; and out of a mare by an equally 

 obscure son of Mambrino Patchen, and her dam in turn 

 of Pilot breeding. Neither the sire or dam approached 

 standard breeding. Finally she was knocked down at 

 $30. The purchaser was a mountaineer who had brought 

 a "bunch" of pigs to the Lexington stock yards and sold 

 them. He took her home, 'way down in the Cumberland 

 Mountain country, used her to plow his corn and potato 



