half a dozen others who felt they could not afford to be behind in the matter of improvement, but more especially that they could not afford to be behind in the finish at the fall and spring race meetings of the future. These importations went on continuously for about twelve years, and until they were interrupted by the excited relations and feelings between the colonies and the mother country and the preparations for the War of the Revolution, which was then imminent. After the close of the Revolution a perfect avalanche of race horses was poured upon us, some of which were good, but a great majority of them were never heard of after their arrival, on the race course or elsewhere. But up to the close of the century they had not succeeded in exterminating the pacer—the saddle horse of a hundred generations. As a specimen of how absurdly a man can talk and even write on subjects of which he knows nothing, I cannot refrain from giving the following from what an Englishman had to say in 1796 about the horses and horsemanship of Virginia: “The horses in common use in Virginia are all of a light description, chiefly adapted for the saddle; some of them are handsome, but are for the most part spoiled by the false gaits which they are taught. The Virginians are wretched horsemen, as indeed are all the Americans I have met with, excepting some few in the neighborhood of New York. They ride with their toes just under the horse’s nose, and their stirrup straps left extremely long, and the saddle being put three or four inches on the mane. As for the management of the reins, it is what they have no conception of. A trot is odious to them, and they express the utmost astonishment at a person who can like that uneasy gait, as they call it. The favorite gaits which all their horses are taught are a pace and a _wrack_. In the first the animal moves his two feet on one side at the same time and gets on with a sort of a shuffling motion, being unable to spring from the ground on these two feet, as in a trot. We should call this an unnatural gait, as none of our horses would ever move in that manner without a rider; but the Americans insist upon it that it is otherwise, because many of their colts pace as soon as born. These kind of horses are called “natural pacers” and it is a matter of the utmost difficulty to make them move in any other manner. But it is not one horse in five hundred that would pace without being taught.”