It is hardly possible to be mistaken in assuming that Rip Van Dam’s letter was written to some person in Philadelphia, and that Mr. Watson saw it there. I would give a great deal for the sight of it; and if it has been preserved in any of the public libraries of that city, either in type or in manuscript form, I have good hopes of yet inspecting it. In one point of view, it is of exceeding value, and that is its date. It is fully established by this letter that, as early as 1711, the Narragansetts were not only established as a breed or family, but that their fame was already widespread. This, of necessity, carries us back into the latter part of the seventeenth century, when their exceptional characteristics were first developed, or began to manifest themselves. In reaching that period we are so near the first importations of horses to the colonies that it is no violence to either history or good sense to conclude that the original Narragansett was one among the very earliest importations. This plays havoc with some Rhode Island traditions, as will be seen below; but with 1711 fixed as a point when the breed was famous, traditions must stand aside. While on this matter of dates, it may not be unprofitable to compare the advent of the Narragansett with the well-known epochs in horse history. Every schoolboy knows that the Darley Arabian and the Godolphin Arabian, say twenty years after, were the great founders of the English race horse. The Narragansetts had reached the very highest pinnacle of fame before the Darley Arabian was foaled. Darley Arabian reached England about the same year that Rip Van Dam’s Narragansett jumped over the side of the sloop and swam ashore, and this was eighty years before there was an attempt at publishing an English stud book. When Janus and Othello, and Traveller, and Fearnaught, the great founders of the American race horse, first reached Virginia, they found the Narragansett pacer had been there more than a generation before. On the point of antiquity, therefore, the Narragansett is older than what we designate as the thoroughbred race horse, and if he has a lineal descendant living to-day the pacer has a longer line of speed inheritance, at his gait, than the galloper. The only attempt at a description of this breed that I have met with is that given by Cooper, the novelist, in a footnote to “The Last of the Mohicans.” This note may be accepted as history, so far as it goes, and pretends to be history; but I am not prepared to admit that all the breed were sorrels. This color, no doubt, prevailed in those specimens that Mr. Cooper had seen or heard of, but I think all colors prevailed, as in other breeds. He says: