established, and by his speed, gameness and bottom he has advanced from the humble position of the family man-of-all-work to the fleet-footed king of the light-harness world—from the simple cabin in the clearing, and the gentle caress of the backwoodman’s family, to the applause of the grand stand. “A scrub, indeed! He was here fighting for independence and an honest living when the forefathers of the Wilkes and Almonts—since old imp. Messenger is regarded as the fountain head—were courting the favor of royalty in England ‘that thrift may follow fawning,’ or carrying soup-drinking Britons on their jolting backs to the wharves of Liverpool, to be shipped over here as food for Tennessee rifles at New Orleans. Plebian, did you say? Why, he ought to be pensioned. He is older and more respectable than the Dutch governors of New York and has a greater claim to patriotism than half of the pensioners who never smelled the smoke of battle. “In Tennessee and Kentucky he has always been a great favorite, and since the race-track act has been added to his many other accomplishments he is destined to be yet more popular. But the student who attempts to trace his development is lost in a maze of thoroughbred blood and ‘native stock.’ That the ‘pacing-bred pacer’ of to-day is simply a mixture of the old ambling pacer of Europe, whatever he was, and thoroughbred there is no doubt in the world. And that this thorough blood has been as good, if not better, than that in old Messenger himself, is also true. But the astonishing thing about this amalgamation is the very small per cent of pacing blood it required to leaven the thoroughbred loaf. A pacing sire bred to a running mare and that offspring to another running mare, and so on for several generations, will end with the last, as with the first, in getting a ‘saddler.’