“It is the old story of the rejected stone, and he now holds up with surprising popularity his corner of the race horse structure. And yet twenty years ago a pacer was scarcely allowed on a fashionable race course; his pedigree, they said, took to the woods on the first cross; he was regarded by the trotting world as a camel-backed, cat-hammed, narrow-chested, curby-legged beast who paced because he couldn’t trot, and was alive because nobody cared to buy powder enough to kill all of them in the woods of Tennessee and Kentucky. He was allowed to exist on the race course very much on the same idea that a slave is allowed to breathe the same air and view the same heaven his master does. He began his career because he was a good kind of an animal to have around to do the race act at the pumpkin show and come in along with the fat woman and the five-legged calf. His coming to the front was his own work; and to use a classical phrase, he was purely the architect of his own fortune. The American people are a long time finding out merit, but nothing helps them to see it as quickly as the image of the American eagle stamped on the back of a silver dollar—and this the pacer has shown them. “Despite the oft-repeated theory of ‘the Canadian pacer,’ there is no doubt that the pacer as now found in Kentucky, Tennessee and the West came originally from the older Atlantic States, such as Virginia and the Carolinas, and that he was brought there by our forefathers from England. The fact that there are pacers in Canada merely proves that in that Dominion also they have been brought from the mother country. To trace their origin in England is both a tedious task and a most uncertain one. Yet, from the best information obtainable, there appears to be but little doubt that the pacer was originally a product of Spain, where many years ago he was bred in the purple as a pleasure animal for the nobility of Andalusia and other Spanish states. In fact, it is more than probable that he was bred with more care than was bestowed by the Spanish upon their now favorite animal—the ass. We know that the pacer was safely domiciled in England as far back as the Norman Conquest, for in ‘Ivanhoe,’ written by that most painstaking scholar and novelist, Sir Walter Scott—a man who wrote truer to nature and with as much historic accuracy as any novelist who has ever lived in England—we find many allusions to the pacer under the style of the palfrey and the ambler.