150 ROAD, TRACK, AND STABLE. 
But the head was ill-shaped, and the eye had the un- 
easy, glassy, indescribable, but easily recognized look 
of a stupid and dangerous animal. Such he proved to 
be; and after being half starved to “keep him down,” 
and then “fed up” to make him look fat again, he 
brought matters to a crisis by running away. Where- 
upon he was sold at auction for about one twentieth 
of the sum that he had cost. 
Only the other day, a trainer of many years’ expe- 
rience assured me that there was nothing in the ex- 
pression of a horse’s eye, — nothing at all; the only 
significance was in the shape of the head. Now the 
shape of the head is significant, but not more so than 
the eye. 
The horse that I have described as suitable for the 
saddle is, as the reader will doubtless have perceived, 
most apt to be found among half-bred animals,—mean- 
ing those that have some fraction, it may be a very 
large or a very small one, of thorough-bred blood,— 
and the nearer thoroughbred, the better. 
Good carriage horses are often described as hunters 
of a large pattern; the Cleveland Bays were part-bred 
horses; the Yorkshire Coach Horse Society counts a 
thoroughbred out cross (“two in and one out”) as 
not disqualifying the animal thus bred for recording 
in its book; and in general it may be said that good 
horses for riding and driving are half-breds. 
But, as no horseman needs to be told, the half-bred 
is often a very poor animal, combining the defects of 
both strains and this is especially the case when all 
the hot blood is on one side, and all the cold blood on 
the other. The produce of a thorougbred horse and 
a cart mare is sometimes a grand beast, with the spirit 
