House and Garden 
therefore to be discouraged because your first horse, 
or your twentieth for that matter, is not perfect at 
once in conformation, in action, in temper and in 
health. Pretty near to perfection is as good as per¬ 
fection itself to those not highly critical. This is no 
suggestion, let me hasten to say, against being crit¬ 
ical either in selecting a horse for purchase or in 
judgment of him afterwards. Horse sense, which 
has long been highly esteemed, does not refer to the 
capacity of the horse, but to the knowledge that we 
acquire in the study of the horse. He is a good text¬ 
book and when we know how to read him at sight we 
have acquired a knowledge that is much rarer than 
the generality of us are willing to admit. This is a 
very curious human characteristic and one that I 
confess I do not know how to account for unless it 
comes by inheritance. Those of us who are of Eng¬ 
lish descent pretty surely get our assumption of 
“horse sense” in that way, for it has been a common 
saying time out of mind—I came across it in the 
London Saturday Review only yesterday—-that every 
good Englishman is at once a horse lover and a good 
horseman. But the assumption and self-deception 
are almost universal. A man will not pretend to 
know Greek if he do not know it at least somewhat, 
nor yet the higher mathematics nor Esoteric Budd¬ 
hism. But the horse—why, to be sure. Have we 
not seen horses all our lives and been served by them ? 
Of course we know them. This self-deception is 
what leads to otir easy undoing when we meet the 
wily gentlemen who give the odds at the race tracks 
and then again when we chaffer with the astute 
horse dealers in an effort either to buy or sell. Still 
there is no cause for discouragement. When we 
have learned humility we are in a proper frame of 
mind to appreciate horse virtues as well as human. 
So, when we have determined that we want a horse 
we must also determine why we want him. Is it to 
catch the train at the station ? Is it to canter over 
KENTUCKY SADDLE HORSE, MAYO 
Owned by Mrs. John Gerken, Sheepshead Hay, N. Y. 
the country roads and by-paths for fun and recrea¬ 
tion ? Is it to drive out on the roads in a runabout 
or rockaway ? Is it to follow the hounds across 
country ? Or is it to do all these things and still keep 
only one horse ? An easy answer to the last question 
would be to say that such capacities could not be 
united in one horse. Probably no one horse would 
be likely to win in a show ring in all the classes enu¬ 
merated. But it is not impossible. I have seen horses 
pretty nearly as good as that. Such horses are called 
general utility horses and in the basic American horse 
stock there are types potential in the qualities that 
make for excellence in all these fields. The man that 
is to keep only one horse, unless he is sure that he 
will only want one class of service from his horse, 
should by all means try to get 
a general utility hack, which 
is ordinarily in the catalogues 
of the dealers called either a 
ride and drive or a combi¬ 
nation horse. 
If you want a horse for 
station work alone then it is 
pretty sure that the animal 
should have size, weight and 
decent speed. Indeed the 
heavy coach horse is about 
the same as that needed for 
station work. We have never 
had in this country a distinctly 
reproducing American coach 
horse type. When they have 
appeared, and still been of 
American blood, they have 
MORGAN STALLION, METEOR MORGAN 
Owned by H. P. Crane, Esq., St. Charles, Illinois 
164 
