Life — March 23, 1893 — page 8: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

: LIFE - A BOOK ABOUT HORSES. N now and the first of June a good many little boys will put on their first trowsers and a good many young men will buy their first horse, Little boys take naturally to trowsers, and are about as much at home in their first pair as in their last. They require no preliminary instructions. Many simply require the trowsers. It is altogether different with the young man and his first horse. Of course it is possible that he and the horse will simply tumble to one another like the trowsers and the little boy. But the chances are against it; to buy trowsers that fit the boy is a simple matter, but to buy a horse that will fit the young man is so complicated a job that the mere suggestion of itis enough to bring wrinkles in the brow of an experi- enced horseman. Sometimes they are lines of gleeful antic- ipation, for there are a good many horsemen who regard inexperienced young men as a special provision made and designed to facilitate the sale of quadrupeds which persons of experience will not buy. For they argue that it is a shame to sell a really good horse to a beginner, who would not know what he had got nor how to use him. Itis kinder as well as more profitable to sell him a horse that will be of some educational value to him, and teach him what to avoid both in future purchases and in the care and use of such horses as he may hereafter own. So large a proportion of the horses extant are available for this sort of educational use that it is highly desirable thatthe young man about to buy would fortify his understanding be- forehand with such information as he can get. Even though he does not learn enough to make a successful first purchase, what he does learn may enable him to locate some of his mis- takes. If he will read with due diligence Mr. H. C. Merwin's “Road, Track and Stable” (Little, Brown & Co.) it will help him to form an ideal of the horse he wants. If he covets a trotter with a pedigree, he can learn from Mr. Merwin’s trea- tise what names the pedigree ought to include. It would be hard for him or any intelligent American to spend half a day more profitably than in becoming permanently familiar with the biographies of the dozen horses or less, from whom all the notable American trotters are derived. He may already know something about such American bipeds as George Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and General Grant, but his knowledge of common ordinary American history is very de- fective until he makes himself familiar with the personal characteristics of such other fathers of the Republic as Mes- senger, Rysdyck's Hambletonian, George Wilkes and Elec- tioneer, Mambrino Chief, Henry Clay, Justice Morgan, Ethan Allen and Diomed. He cannot talk trotting horse even a little bit unless he has a speaking acquaintance with such famous sires as these, and unless his associates are few and exceptional it will often happen to him that he must talk trotting horse or nothing. It behooves him, therefore, to improve the very chance that Mr. Merwin offers and qualify himself betimes. Besides what he learns about trotting horses, he will get some idea from Mr. Merwin's book about road horses, sad- dle horses, carriage horses and cobs, cart horses, fire horses, Arabian horses, and the care and treatment of horses in gen- eral, all of which will make his society much more remuner- ative at the next horse show than it was at the last. He will learn, too, to be very kind and polite always to the horse, to offer him a chair when he is tired, make him a bran mash when his head aches, take his shoes off before he goes to bed, to be proud of his merits and patient with his excen- tricities, and never, never after he has grown old or lame in service to turn him over to the harsh uses of an unscrupulous stranger. NEW BOOKS. THE HARVARD BOAT BOOK. Cambridge: John Wilson and Son. Blackfoot Lodge Tales, By George Bird Grinnell. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. In the Three Zones, Sons, Short Stories. Volume XI., Sept.-Dec., 1892. Literature Publishing Company. By F, J. Stimson. New York: Charles Scribner's New York: The Current ADVANTAGES OF A MESMERIC EYE. THE comicbooks.com