A NOTE. 



The title of this book requires an explanation. Since I have been 

 able to own a horse, a matter of about twelve years, I have made it a 

 practice to go for a long drive on Sunday afternoons, as it is the only 

 time a wage earner, which I have been since a boy, can call his own. 

 In Cleveland my outings were taken behind a little brown mare named 

 Juda, whose memory will always be green in the family; Tirzah, by 

 Dictator, and The Hawk, a harum scarum gelding that was all his 

 name implied. After coming to Hartford, in 1896, I purchased the 

 bay mare Bessie Wilkes, 2:33, by Wilkie Collins, and in the past seven 

 years I have driven her over twenty-five thousand miles, an average 

 of about ten miles a day, over the roads of Connecticut. In that time 

 I also had many a drive behind her stable companions, the airy gaited 

 pacer, Touch Me Not, 2:13^, by Pocahontas Sam, and gallant old 

 Guy, 2:09^ , the war horse of the Mambrino family of trotters. 



Those who study the weather will remember the batch of wet 

 Sundays which were placed on record during the spring and summer 

 of 1902. They cut off my drives and while Bessie Wilkes and Guy 

 stood in their box stalls munching hay and stamping at flies, I wrote 

 and revised the most of the material in this book. It was, in a 

 measure, a holiday jaunt wheeling about among memories long since 

 relegated to the garret. While recalling the old days, the dripping 

 eaves and muddy roads were forgotten and as 



Into each life some rain must fall, 

 Some days must be dark and dreary," 



I present them in the hope that under similar conditions those who 

 love a good horse and enjoy driving or riding on the road or on the 

 turf may find in them at least a flicker in the window of cheerfulness 

 when the rain is falling and the clouds hang low. 



W. H. GOCHER. 

 Hartford, Conn., 



November i, 1903. 



