We here have a stock of horses that the people of Virginia have bred and ridden and raced for a hundred years, and we know comparatively nothing about them. They seem to have been specially adapted to the saddle, but they could run four miles, or they could run a quarter of a mile, like an arrow from a bow. They were not a breed, although selecting and crossing and interbreeding for a hundred years would make them quite homogeneous. There is a romantic interest attaching to these little horses, for we have reached the middle of the eighteenth century, and all the successive idols of this race-loving people are about to be dethroned by their own act, and their homage transferred to a stranger—a larger and finer animal and faster over a distance of ground. Whatever of glory and honor, to say nothing of money, that was to be achieved from this time forward was to be ascribed to the newly arrived English race horse. But the truth should not be concealed that this old stock furnished half the foundation, in a vast majority of cases, for the triumphs of future generations of the Virginia race horse, and the same may be said of the old English stock upon which the eastern blood was engrafted. About the middle of the eighteenth century the line was drawn, and there was thereafter developed the engrafting of the new upon the old. In 1751-52, Moreton’s imported Traveller was there, and he was the only English race horse advertised that year. There may have been two or three others, but they had not made themselves known to the public, and I very much doubt whether there was any other. A very few years later there were many others, and some of them of great celebrity. Mr. J. F. D. Smith made an extended tour of the colonies, especially of Virginia, before the Revolutionary war, and he suffered some of the inconveniences growing out of the rising hostility to the mother country. In speaking of quarter racing, he says: “In the southern part of the colony and in North Carolina, they are much attached to Quarter Racing, which is always a match between two horses to run one quarter of a mile, straight out, being merely an exertion of speed; and they have a breed that perform it with astonishing velocity, beating every other for that distance with great ease, but they have no bottom. However, I am confident that there is not a horse in England, nor perhaps in the whole world, that can excel them in rapid speed; and these likewise make excellent saddle horses for the road.”