18 ROAD, TRACK, AND STABLE. 
history of the trotting horse will perceive the truth 
of this statement. 
I read lately of a former well known M. F. H. who 
kept an enormous equine establishment, and yet 
among all his men there was but one fit to be in- 
trusted with the exercise of his best hunters. 
To create the trotter, increasing his speed within 
seventy-five years froma mile in 2.40 to a mile in 
2.083, was perhaps an even greater achievement than 
the development of the modern thoroughbred in the 
one hundred and fifty years that have elapsed since 
the importation to England of the Godolphin Arabian. 
The utility of the achievement is another matter; and 
I should confess to some sympathy with the critic 
who was inclined to estimate it lightly. But what- 
ever we may think of the result, whether or not we 
hold that a 2.08 horse is greatly better than u 2.40 
horse, the value of the process by which this result 
was reached can hardly be exaggerated. The trainers 
of the American trotter have taught the world the 
best lesson that it has ever received in the ethics of 
horse-keeping. 
The case of Johnston, the famous pacer, illustrates 
what can be accomplished by humoring the sensitive 
equine disposition. “He was,” writes John Splan, 
his trainer and driver, “the most nervous horse that 
T ever saw, and I found that in shipping him about 
from one track to another he became more nervous 
and irritable. If you left him long alone in the stable, 
he would tramp around like a wild animal, and get 
himself in a sweat. If anybody went into the stall 
next to him, and began to hammer or make anything 
like a loud noise, he would try to climb out of the 
