Good horses there were, of course, though very few good saddle-horses (America is not productive in this direction),--and the possible animals were held at impossible prices. Those who rode over the new Park lands usually rode anything but good saddle-horses. Fast trotters, stout ponies, tolerable carriage-horses, capital cart-horses, there were in plenty. But the clean-cut, thin-crested, bright-eyed, fine-eared, steel-limbed saddle-horse, the saddle-horse _par excellence_,--may I say the only saddle-horse?--rarely came under observation; and when, by exception, such a one did appear, he was usually so ridden that his light was sadly dimmed. It was hard to recognize an elastic step under such an unelastic seat. Finally, in the days of my despair, a kind saddler,--kept to his daily awl by a too keen eye for sport, and still, I believe, a victim to his propensity for laying his money on the horse that ought to win but don't,--hearing of my ambition (to him the most laudable of all ambitions), came to put me on the long-sought path. He knew a mare, or he had known one, that would exactly suit me. She was in a bad way now, and a good deal run down, but he always thought she "had it in her," and that some gentleman ought to keep her for the saddle,--"which, in my mind, sir, she be the finest bit of 'orse-flesh that was hever imported, sir." That was enough. "Imported" decided my case, and I listened eagerly to the enthusiastic story,--a story to which this man's life was bound with threads of hard-earned silver, and not less by a real honest love for a fine animal. He had never been much given to saving, but he was a good workman, and the little he had saved had been blown away in the dust that clouded his favorite at the tail of the race. Still, he attached himself to her person, and followed her in her disgrace. "She weren't quite quick enough for the turf, sir, but she be a good 'un for a gentleman's 'ack." He had watched her for years, and scraped acquaintance with her different owners as fast as she had changed them, and finally, when she was far gone with pneumonia, he had accepted her as a gift, and, by careful nursing, had cured her. Then, for a time, he rode her himself, and his eye brightened as he told of her leaps and her stride. Of course he rode her to the races, and--one luckless day--when he had lost everything, and his passion had got the better of his prudence, he staked the mare herself on a perfectly sure thing in two-mile-heats. Like most of the sure things of life, this venture went to the bad, and the mare was lost,--lost to a Bull's Head dealer in single driving horses. "I see her in his stable ahfter that, sir; and, forbieten she were twelve year old, sir, and 'ad 'ad a 'ard life of it, she were the youngest and likeliest of the lot,--you'd swore she were a three-year-old, sir."