280 ROAD, TRACK, AND STABLE. 
Often, indeed, it requires the eye of a skilled horse- 
man to detect the merit and high breeding of a mare 
fresh from the desert, in her winter coat and winter 
condition. An old traveller relates how such a mare, 
sent by a Nedji prince to an Egyptian Pasha, was 
criticised by those who saw her: “ Merry were these 
men of settled countries, used to stout hackneys. 
‘The carrion!’ cried one, for indeed she was lean 
and uneurried. ‘The Pasha would not accept her,’ 
said another. But a Syrian who stood by quietly 
remarked, ‘A month at Shem, and she will seem 
better than now.’ And some Bedouins who were 
present declared her worth to be thirty camels.” 
Jt is true, as this traveller sagely declared, that 
men of “settled countries, used to stout hackneys,” 
often prefer an inferior horse to the pure-bred Ara- 
bian. The Barb, for example, has a bigger crest and 
is more on the prancing order. 
I have touched already upon the views of the 
Arabo-maniacs. With them the problem of horse- 
breeding is a very simple one, the solution being to 
discard all other breeds as mongrels, and to go back 
to “the primitive horse,” the horse of the desert. 
On the other hand, most practical men engaged in 
the business deride this notion. “I cannot help 
thinking,” writes one such, “that of all insane ideas 
the maddest is that which some enthusiasts have of 
permanently improving English race horses by an 
admixture of Arab blood, as if the difference between 
the various breeds of horses were not the result of 
climate, selection, stable management, work, and 
training.” It is, I believe, a fact-—so malleable 
is horseflesh —that a thoroughbred foal, born in 
