CHAPTER XV. 



How Races were Won and Lost. 



The last meeting held before this had been the Autumn 

 Meeting at Seville. "We had here run a three-year-old 

 colt, " Solitario," who had lately made a most sensational 

 debut at the Cadiz Autumn Meeting. His owner, Don 

 Thomas Heredia, had shown this colt to me in the previous 

 June when stopping at Malaga, en route to Gibraltar, from 

 the races at Granada. He was then just being handled, 

 and though Heredia had written to say he should like to 

 run him in the autumn, I begged him not to do so, 

 thinking there was no time to get him ready, and that he 

 had better be kept until the following spring. For this 

 reason he had not come with the rest of Heredia's horses 

 to the earlier autumn meetings. Later on, however, he 

 again wrote and said he would send him to Cadiz, and 

 hoped I would ride him there, if I did not mind doing so. 

 It had never occurred to me that a colt, brought up all his 

 life on hard food, and never getting any grass, would take 

 a shorter time in getting " fit " than a young horse in 

 England, who has been living in a grass field. The 

 consequence was, that when we arrived at Cadiz, a few 

 days before the races, and took the horses out to work, I 

 did not think a great deal about the colt, having many 

 others to see after, and imagined that his chance of winning 

 a race was nil. 



