CURSORY REMARKS. 
419 
ride to the water-trough to drink ad libitum just before he starts. 
My friend’s description of the effects are by no means amiss : — 
“ I have plenty of shooting says he, “ before I reach my 
ground but still he says not a word about broken-wind. 
Now what are we to infer from all this? I can infer nothing 
further than that, independently of the fact of working-horses in 
France being always stabled, and not subject to the in-and-out- 
of-door system, the hay, which has not been allowed to run into 
fermentation in the rick, must be more wholesome and less 
inclining to thirst and inward heat than that which has ; that 
there is a cooling, aperient, and, consequently, alterative property 
in the wheaten straw ; and that, despite of the water, the lax state 
in which the bowels of French horses are kept, to which, no 
doubt, the water, ad libitum , with the help of bran, which is 
freely given, adds, contribute together to ward off those diseases 
of the viscera which produce broken-wind. As for the pace, I 
agree with Mr. Hallen, of the 6th Dragoons, it has very little to 
do with it, generally speaking ; although I am inclined to think, 
that were horses which never go beyond a walk, such as cart 
and waggon-horses, to be fed as carefully as hunters are, cases 
of broken-wind would not be so frequent amongst them as they 
are now known to be. I here, however, confine myself to food, 
as we are aware that a bad cold will occasionally end in broken- 
wind. 
My own experience of broken-winded horses in work is very 
limited. I drove one two years in my gig, and he did me a great 
deal of work, although he once choked in his collar at the top of 
a hill, and dropped as if he had been shot. Still I had myself 
to thank for it, having driven him too fast, and it was after a 
dinner at a fishing party. His rate of speed, however, depended 
on his treatment previously to going to work — that is, on short 
commons and the muzzle. I knew one broken-winded gig-horse 
that could go ten miles an hour with ease, but he dropped down 
dead under a servant, who declared that he was riding him at 
the rate of only seven miles in the hour at the time. This was a 
horse called Halkin, a ci-devant hunter, the property of the late 
Mr. Roynon Jones*, of sporting celebrity, and pronounced by 
Lord Sefton to have been the finest thorough-bred horse he ever 
beheld. I wish. Sir, you had his skeleton for observation^* . Mr. 
Jones drove this horse seventy-two miles in one day, with only 
once baiting, after he was decidedly broken-winded. He was 
* This was the gentleman who sold a hunter called Hermit, to Sir Horace 
St. Paul, for 700 guineas in Leicestershire. 
f Mr. Watt told me, a month back, that he had given the skeleton of 
Blacklock to the Museum at York. 
