A regiment with his courage would ride over the guns of a Balaklava; a state with his honesty would need no criminal laws; give scholars his patience, and the stars would be their playthings; imbued with his power of endurance, the weakest nation would tunnel mountains as a child a sand hill, build cities as a dreamer builds castles, and shoulder the world with a laugh. To one who sees him as he is, and loves him for his intrinsic greatness, he is all this and more. Man’s honest servant, dumb exemplar, truest helper, best friend. In his master’s hour of recreation, he is the joyful spirit that whirls him, at the swish of a whip, along the dizzy course where the whistling winds sing their warning. In his hours of stern reality, when fortunes hang on his hoof beats and fame stands balanced on the wire that ends the home-stretch, he is the embodiment of power and dignity, the champion of might and the god of victory. And finally, in his gentler moods, he is the faithful servant of the stubble and the plow, the gentle guardian of the family turn-out, who hauls the laughing children along the by-ways amid the sweet grasses, where the sunshine and the zephyrs play. Out from the past, the dim, bloody, shifting past, came this noble animal, the horse, side by side with man, fighting with him the battles of progress, bearing with him the burdens of the centuries. Down the long, hard road, through flint or mire, through swamp or sand, wherever there has been a footprint, there also will be seen a hoof-print. They have been one and inseparable, the aim and the object, the means and the end. And if the time shall ever come, as some boastingly declare, when the one shall breed away from the other, the puny relic of a once perfect manhood will not live long enough to trace the record of it on the tablet of time. The greatest distinct family of horses that has ever lived is the Hal family of pacers, a distinctively Tennessee product, originating in that peculiar geological formation known as the Middle Basin--the bluegrass region of Tennessee. To understand the greatness of this family of horses--now known throughout the world, wherever speed and endurance has a name--it is only necessary to publish the following table of world-records held by them. These records have all been won in the last quarter of a century, the remarkable fact being that before that time these horses lived only for the plow, the saddle or the wheel, and that nearly all of them are sons and daughters or descendants of one horse--a roan, known locally as Gibson’s Tom Hal, from the fact that Capt. Thomas Gibson, a gentleman of the old school, then living on his estate in Maury County, Tenn., and now the efficient secretary of the Nashville, Chattanooga & St. Louis Railway Library, first reclaimed him from obscurity and brought him to the county where his greatness was recognized.