Didn’t all the world know him—all the great, wide world, extending from Leesburg to Louisville? For there was nothing beyond. You bet your life they did. They all knew “Doc an’ his pacin’ stud.” And Doc died and went the way of all the others he helped over the Styx, and, saddest of all, he left us nothing that we know. For knowledge at last is just nothing that we know. Less even than Shakespeare. For we know positively three things of Shake: He stole a deer in his youth, he married Anne Hathaway in his manhood, and he died and left a will in his older age—left a will in which he very cautiously told what was to be done with his best bed. But Tom Hal, the equal of his kind—equal even to Billy Shake and Dr. Jonson—of Tom Hal (he never had any best bed), and all we know is he was bought in Philadelphia, was a little, clean-limbed, rubber-hard pacer, and had his eyes ridden out of his head by a little wind-galled, blood-letting Doctor. Great is Billy Shake! Great is Tommy Hal! Genius runs in parallel lines, and after centuries of mixing recipes to produce it, mankind has given it up and is willing to let it hit the earth now and then, untrammeled by toe-weights, unreined, unchecked, unbitted and unspurred. Shakespeare once wrote a description of a horse. You will find it in Venus and Adonis (if you’re not an old maid or a preacher), and this verse is as great and beautiful a description of Tom Hal, as he was and as he must have looked then (barring his “fet-locks shag and long”), as the poem itself is the most vivid and beautiful story of red-hot, immodest love: “Look, when a painter would surpass the life In limning out a well proportioned steed, His art with Nature’s workmanship at strife, As if the dead the living would exceed: “Round-hoofed, short-jointed, fet-locks shag and long, Broad breast, full eye, small head and nostril wide, High crest, short ears, straight legs and passing strong, Thin mane, thick tail, broad buttock, tender hide— Look, what a horse should have he did not lack, Save a proud rider, on so proud a back.” But the horse of Shakespeare’s day was not the horse of Tom Hal’s day. “Round-hoofed, short-jointed, fetlocks shag and long,” doubtless expressed the Norman blood that Shakespeare knew. To-day the round-hoofed ones are plugs, the short-jointed ones are cart horses, and those with fetlocks shag and long are close kin to the Mustang. But the rest of it was Tom Hal: “Broad breast, full eye, small head and nostrils wide, High crest, short ears, straight legs and passing strong.” Yes, all this was the first Tom Hal—and more. * * * * * Lexington, Ky., May 3. Mr. John Trotwood Moore, Nashville, Tenn.