However, for nearly two centuries the pacer never was thought of as a factor in horse development, especially as a race horse until the advent of the Hal family of Tennessee, in the early 70’s, with Little Brown Jug and Mattie Hunter, although the great bloodlines and speed of Pocahontas, James K. Polk and other noted pacers in the early ’40’s ought to have foretold what great possibilities lay in the despised pacing gait. As usual, the rejected stone found itself in the key of the arch, and out of Tennessee, by what some might term chance, but in fact the legitimate product of scientific breeding, of soil, of climate and grass, out of an obscure family of saddle horses, bred with no idea of racing and with never a thought of fame, but taken, like Coriolanus, literally from the plow, this horse is found--the first to go a mile in two minutes or better, and to do almost without price and without effort what the millionaires of horsedom had spent fortunes to do in vain. This was first accomplished by Star Pointer, at Readville, Mass., September 2, 1897. Such a family deserves to be perpetuated in history, however brief it may be and unpretentiously written. And I beg the future as well as the present historian not to criticise too closely its style, for in it, as I go along, a hundred fancies will twine themselves with my facts. There is so much about man and horse that is akin. There is so much of human nature in both--there is such a chance for moralizing on their life, their death, their fame, their fortune, their brief days’ strut on the stage of time, their passing out--“and the rest is silence.” And, speaking of fame in both man and horse, is it not all a lottery? With men she is a sly and uncertain goddess, coming seldom to those who court her, and often to others who care nothing for her, so, in the rearing of race-horses the same uncertainty exists, and matron after matron bred in purple lines may go on throwing quitters and lunkheads year after year, while some obscure dam, whose breeding is barely tolerable, but stamped by nature with a spirit of fire and a soul of steel, sends out from some hithertofore obscure breeders’ farm a race horse that sets a new mark for speed and a new fashion for blood lines. In a decision, Judge Gaynor, of the Supreme Court of King’s County, New York, in a case against the president of the Gravesend track, where runners are raced, held that horse racing was not a lottery. This may be true within the technical meaning of the term, lottery, but if the honorable court had held that breeding race horses was not a lottery, we have our doubt whether the decision would have met with the unanimous consent of the breeders themselves. And, as we remarked above, fame itself is not more uncertain.