I am not just absolutely clear in my mind that Quiver ought to be included in the list of great Queens, but she was the first actually to win an open Championship, for Ladybird only met New Zealanders and does not count, and the finish with Wallace proclaimed the Trenton mare to be a stayer, and a game one to boot. This was a period in our story when good mares flourished. For Lady Trenton, the winner of the Sydney Cup, was a contemporary of Quiver, although she cannot be included amongst the Queens. She was a graceful, beautiful mover, a thorough Trenton, but a handicap mare only. Her pedigree is interesting, in that her dam was the famous Black Swan, by Yattendon from Maid of the Lake, “whose pedigree,” says the Stud Book, “cannot be ascertained.” As Lady Trenton was foaled as lately as 1889, it is a little curious that her grand dam’s pedigree should be wrapped in mystery. Sir Rupert Clarke’s La Carabine was the Champion winner in 1901 and 1902. She is pronounced unhesitatingly “a Queen.” Her first season did not appear to hold out much hope of mighty deeds in the future; at least, to those who were not acquainted with her domestic history. She was a chestnut, foaled in 1894, by Carbine out of imported Oratava, by Barcaldine, from Tullia, by Petrarch, her dam Chevisaunce, by Stockwell out of Paradigm, by Paragone from Ellen Horne, the maternal ancestress of Bend Or. Her breeder was Mr. O’Shanassy, but it was in the nomination of Mr. Herbert Power that she was launched upon her career as a two-year-old. She was an exceedingly mean-looking creature during her first season. Being much enamoured of her pedigree, I undertook the long journey to Melbourne from the Murray in order that I might see her perform. I was standing in the saddling enclosure looking out for the filly, when there passed me a mean, ragged-looking, little thing, with a mournful cast of countenance, and she knuckled over on both her hind fetlocks at each step. “What on earth is that miserable little brute?” I inquired from a knowledgeable friend at my side. “Oh! that’s a two-year-old in Jimmy Wilson’s stable. La Carabine they call her.” This was a great shock, and her running that season did not bewray the great possibilities that lay beneath her rather washy chestnut hide. She was successful in a Nursery at Randwick in the autumn, carrying seven stone seven, but beating nothing of any great account, and she was absolutely unsuccessful as a three-year-old. At four years she managed to dead heat at Flemington with Dreamland, who, however, beat her in the run off, at a mile and a half. But for this faint silver lining to her cloud, everything was still in darkness. But I knew that she could beat Key, one of the greyhounds of the turf, at anything beyond half a mile, and that she could stay. Therefore, Hope was not yet altogether dead.