confidential groom that his horses are well turned out, and well looked after. Following the suggestions just referred to, he should insist on the best management possible in his

own stable, and he must know, and not merely think, that if the general appearance of a horse is unsatisfactory, something is wrong, and that wrong must be righted and the horse brought up to look first-rate. Aim at perfection, and, if you do not quite attain it, at least you will get far better results than the

FORELEG

average person does, for good luck is good management, as a general rule, in or out of a stable.

Thousands of miserable-looking, half-worthless horses you come across every year, and fresh

ones, equally worthless, are bred to take their place when their predecessors die of old age or are shot. They are only fit for the kennels, and often have hardly enough meat on for that destina

tion. Yet, despite these warnings, breeders continue to breed from unsound horses or ill-shaped Some are undersized or ill-shaped, and

ones.

then these deplorable failures, bred on wrong lines undeniably, and often reared with equal care

lessness, give the risky pastime of breeding, or coping an even worse name than it deserves. It is undoubtedly a risk to buy a young, sound

horse, and to expect to make a speedy profit. If you do contemplate such a venture, be sure you pick a youngster worth owning, have him passed by a vet, and then use all these previous hints to the best advantage, adding plenty of others derived from the experience of yourself and others; to be valuable they must be based on shrewd common-sense, otherwise they are mere cranks, and there are far too many stable cranks already, without adding to the number.

NOTE. All boots shown in these illustrations are made by George Parker & Sons.

PART III

CHAPTER VI

BRILLIANT HORSEMEN

It seems needless to emphasise how inexhaustible is the subject of horses-one studied during hundreds, even thousands of years by kings, statesmen, soldiers, business men, and yet there is so much to learn, that the task of giving the faintest outline of what has been chronicled, and what might be, seems hopeless.

Here is a very incomplete sketch of some of our most brilliant horsemen. Yet, just as

"Many are poets who have never penned

Their inspiration, and perchance the best,"

so are there countless instances of riders as good, or nearly as good, as those I am about to refer to, who, through lacking notoriety or good mounts, are less known or only known locally. That this must be so the reader will easily acknowledge if he attends race-meetings in Buenos Ayres, Australia, New Zealand, and other parts of the world where residents are lovers of thoroughbred horses, and prepared to pay big prices for them, or who breed them at great expense.

It would, indeed, puzzle a first-rate judge of pace to know how to class the horsemanship of