“Within ten years one of my aged neighbors, Enoch Lewis, since deceased, informed me he had been to Virginia as one of the riding boys, to return a similar visit of the Virginians in that section, in a contest on the turf; and that such visits were common with the racing sportsmen of Narragansett and Virginia, when he was a boy. Like the old English country gentlemen, from whom they were descended, they were a horse-racing, fox-hunting, feasting generation.” This paragraph from Mr. Hazard’s pen has been the subject of very deliberate consideration. The first promptings of my judgment were to doubt and reject it, especially on account of the absence of date to the letter, and of the remote period in which Mr. Enoch Lewis must have visited Virginia. Another question, as to why we have not this information from any other source except Mr. Hazard, presented itself with no inconsiderable force. After viewing the matter in all its bearings I am forced to concede that it is likely to be true. These visits must have taken place before the Revolution, and from the construction we are able to place upon the dates, this was not impossible. It is a fact that I do not hesitate to announce that before the Revolution racing in all its forms was more universally indulged in as an amusement than it ever has been since. This was before the days of newspapers, and all we can possibly know of the sporting events of that period we must gather up from the detached fragments that have come down to us by tradition. There was a strong bond of sympathy and friendship between the followers of Dr. McSparran in Rhode Island, surrounded as they were by Puritans, and their co-religionists in Virginia. They were accustomed to maritime life, and had abundance of vessels fitted up for the shipment of horses and other live stock to foreign ports. To take a number of their fastest pacers on board one of their sloops and sail for Virginia would not have been considered much of an adventure. These visits were not only occasions of pleasure and festivity, with the incidental profits of winning purses and bets, but they were a most successful means of advertising the Narragansett pacer; and through these means alone the market was opened, as Dr. McSparran expresses it, in all parts of British America. When we consider the widespread fame of these Rhode Island horses, and that there were no other means by which they could have achieved it, except by their actual performances, we are forced to the conclusion that they were carried long distances, and in many directions, for purely sporting purposes. That these visits would result in the transfer of a good number of the best and fastest horses from Narragansett to Virginia would be a natural sequence, and thus, in after years, we might look for a strong infusion of Narragansett blood in the Virginian pacing-horse.