His first purchase was at Aleppo, where he got a mare he named Hagar, as he says, “for a very moderate sum.” “She was of the Kehilan-Ajuz breed.” “When purchased she was in very poor condition, having just gone through the severe training of a campaign.” “She was bred by the Gommussa, the most able of the horse-breeding tribes, had passed from them to the Roala, and had now been captured and ridden some two hundred miles, in hot haste, for sale to Aleppo.” “We never met anything in our travels that could compete with her over a distance, and she has often run down foxes and even hares, without assistance, carrying thirteen stone on her back.” This was the first experience of the English “tenderfoot” among Syrian horsethieves. According to his own showing, he bought her from the fellow who had stolen her and had ridden her two hundred miles to escape, and he accepted what the thief told about the breeding of the mare as true. The thief knew just what Mr. Blunt wanted and he shaped the pedigree and tracing to suit the purchaser. Mr. Blunt had no knowledge of this mare’s breeding, nor where she came from; still, her blood was to become one of the great influences in renovating the English race horse. This incident is of no importance, in itself, except as it illustrates the universal conditions under which amateurs buy horses in the Orient. Upon leaving Aleppo, the party traveled eastward till they struck the Euphrates and then down the right bank of that river. The first town of any importance was Deyr, on the river, and just across was ancient Mesopotamia. They were still in the border land between the productive north and the desert south, with the Syrian desert between them and the Arabian desert. All this region is occupied with a mixture of races, employed in varied pursuits, with but a feeble trace of tribal authority, as all are under the direct government of the Sultan of Turkey. “Deyr is well-known,” Mr. Blunt says, “as a horse market, and is, perhaps, the only town north of the Jebel Shammar where the inhabitants have any general knowledge of the blood and breeding of the beasts they possess. The townsmen, indeed, are but a single step removed from the Bedouins, their undoubted ancestors. They usually purchase their colts as yearlings either from the Gomussa, or some of the Sabaa tribes, and having broken them thoroughly, sell them at three years old to the Aleppo merchants. They occasionally, too, have mares left with them, in partnership, by the Anazah, and from these they breed according to the strictest desert rules. It is, therefore, for a stranger, by far the best market for thoroughbreds in Asia, and you may get some of the best blood at Deyr that can be found anywhere, besides having a guarantee of its authenticity, impossible, under ordinary circumstances, to get at Damascus or Aleppo. There are, I may say, no horses at Deyr but thoroughbreds.”