194 ROAD, TRACK, AND STABLE. 
High-steppers, or park or sensation horses, as they 
are sometimes called, stand by themselves,—in a 
small and very expensive class. Their gait is not 
merely, or even chiefly, a means of locomotion, — it is 
an end in itself; and very pretty is the effect of their 
peculiar up-and-down step, especially when they are 
driven at a slow trot, with all the accessories of a fine 
equipage. They travel as if they had springs in their 
hoofs, their knees at the upward stroke seeming al- 
most to touch the musical, well burnished pole chains 
with which they are often and most suitably har- 
nessed. The high-stepper expresses, so far as a horse 
can do it, the insolence of wealth. In his prime he 
would furnish a good text for a sermon, and in his 
decay he might point the moral of a pathetic tale. 
These horses are distinctly for show, not for use. 
“You may drive your steppers,” one authority re- 
marks, “very slowly for the most part, and fast a 
short distance, if they shine in a fast trot, for two 
hours or so every day; but if you want to go ten 
miles out of town and back, you must fall back on a 
useful pair, or hire post horses.” 
The best of our sensation horses come from Maine, 
perhaps because its stony pastures tend to make the 
horses that run in them step high. The deep snows 
which prevail during the long winter in that latitude 
probably have a similar effect. A man wading through 
snow steps uncommonly high, and it is the same with 
ahorse. ‘Ten years ago a really high-stepping carriage 
horse was almost unknown in this country, but we 
raise many of them now; the demand partly causing 
the supply to exist, and partly calling it forth from 
its hiding place where it existed before. A “Down 
