“The fruit of this union was a bay colt, foaled May 5, 1849, at Sugar Loaf, near Chester, Orange County, New York. This colt, when five weeks old, was purchased from the breeder, Jonas Seely, by a plain farmer with a lean pocket-book. The price named for mare and colt was $125, and the farmer, William M. Rysdyk, sat on the top rail of a fence and pondered for some time the vital question. The outlay would embarrass him if the mare or colt should die. He finally said yes, and the mother and son were taken to Chester. The bay colt, with star and hind ankles white, grew into a powerful horse 15.2, and was named Hambletonian. His head was large and expressive, his neck rather short, his shoulders and quarters massive and his legs broad and flat. His triple line to thoroughbred Messenger, over the substance imparting cross of Bellfounder, gave us the greatest progenitor of harness speed the world has seen.” I once believed all this just as sincerely as I am sure Mr. Busbey believes it, and, some ten years ago, I wrote this fiction about Hambletonian: “Messenger begat Mambrino, and Mambrino begat Abdallah, and Abdallah begat Hambletonian. Now, the race may be said to have fairly begun, for there is scarcely a trotting horse in America which has not in its blood one, two, or three strains of this Hambletonian blood, for Hambletonian was the great-sire of trotters. He was a Messenger on both sides, great-grandson in the male line, and grandson and great-grandson in the female line, from which also came a new English cross, for his dam was by the imported hackney Bellfounder.[5] In him the Messenger blood was strong, and, himself a trotter of much speed, though never trained, he had the capacity of transmitting the trotting gait in a greater degree than any horse in history.” Footnote 5: No human being in the world knows anything whatever about the breeding of the Charles Kent mare, Hambletonian’s dam.