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Show New Tork as a Tlorse Market. New York has come to be looked upon as the great mart for blooded equities, and instead of colts and Allies being displayed, as of yore, in thoir ancestral an-cestral paddocks they are transported to that city and exhibited in the American Ameri-can Institute building. The dangers of travol are more than offset by the larger attendance of rich buyers secured in the metropolis and the consequent increase in prices obtained. The smallest man and the shrewdest inspector of horses at some of the sales of last spring was Robert Steel, of Philadelphia, the introducer intro-ducer of the Happy Medium strain into the trotting blood of the United States and one of the first men to largely engage en-gage as a business in the breeding of fast trotters. As he looked with kindling eyes upon the glossy skins of the youngsters being paraded before him on one occasion he said: "How marvelous has been the improvement im-provement in our trotting horses within the lost ten years and, more wonderful sti.l, with breeders increasing in numbers and consequently fast horses also, tho prices of good horses have grown enormously. enor-mously. Less than ten years ago a brood mare which brought $1,000 was a phenomenal phe-nomenal animal and the announcement of such figures astounded people. Now such horses range in price from $1,000 to $15,000, and a man who possesses o brood mure one of whose progeny has made a great record owns enough to support him unless his ideas of living are extraordinarily extra-ordinarily lavish. "Why is it that the price of blooded . horse flesh has increased so rapidly? There are two chief reasons. The first is that horses today, as a result of additional addi-tional knowledge on the part of trainers and owing to constant experiments in crossing Btrains, are finer bred than ever before in the history of the world, so that from the expression of twenty years ago, '2:40. on a plank road,' being an expression of superlative swiftness we have come now to a condition of equine affairs in which if a man's every day roadster cannot trot down in the twenties twen-ties he is sneered at by the drivers he brushes with upon the rood. "The second reason is that men who drive horses for pleasure keep more now than they did ten years ago. Then few mon who enjoyed this most delightful pastime kept more than one horse, but they found that a lameness today and a soreness to-morrow and a cough the next week doomed them to frequent disappointments, disap-pointments, and so now gentlemen drivers driv-ers who can afford the luxury rarely keep less than three fast horsas." |