As to the gaits I find just twice as many pacers as trotters. Double-gaited animals, of which there were a few, I have here classed with the pacers. That many of these little fellows were very stout and tough is fully demonstrated by the fact that they could run heats of four miles with a hundred and forty pounds on their backs. This closes the first epoch in the history of the Virginia horse. The fleet and compact little horse of thirteen to fourteen hands had had his day, and he was now about to be overshadowed by a greater in speed and a greater in stature. Much of the blood of the little fellow that could run four miles and pace “at a prodigious rate,” was commingled with the blood of the English race horse, but whatever its triumphs, the lately arrived “foreigner” took the credit. A man would have been pronounced “clean daft” if at that time he had dreamed that one hundred and forty years later the blood of this little pacer would stand at the head of the great trotting interest of the world. The tough little fellow has retained his qualities through all the generations in which he has been neglected, despised and forgotten, until he was taken up twenty odd years ago, and now the names and achievements of the great pacers are as familiar to the whole American people as ever were the name of the greatest running horses. It is not known how long he continued to be a factor in the racing affairs of Virginia, but probably not later than about 1760. From about 1750 to 1770 seems to have been a period of great prosperity in Virginia and, notwithstanding the general improvidence of the times, many of the large landholders and planters were getting rich from their fine crops of tobacco and their negroes. This prosperity manifested itself strongly in the direction of the popular sport of horse racing and improving the size, quality, and fleetness of the running horse. England had then been selecting, importing Eastern blood, and “breeding to the winner” for a hundred years, with more or less intelligence and success, while the colonists had rested content with the descendants of the first importations from the mother country. Doubtless progress had been made here too, but it was as the progress of a poor man against another with great wealth and backed by the encouragements of royalty. The English horse could then run clear away from the Saracenic horse, his so-called progenitor, and he was very much larger than that “progenitor.” We can understand how the speed might be increased by its development in a series of generations and by always breeding to the fastest, but the increase of size can hardly be accounted for as the result of climatic causes—but we are getting away from the thought before us. When the Virginia planter found he had a handsome balance in London, subject to his draft, he at once ordered his factor to send him over the best racing stallion he could find. The action of one planter stirred up