So The Hartford Courant described Beautiful Bay, and the rhyme was a by-word about the town—for they were very proud of Beautiful Bay in Hartford. It was not long before True heard the couplet in the stables, and right proud was he to be the son of so praised a father.
Beautiful Bay told True many stirring tales in the quiet nights they spent so close together, for the older horse had ever been a “soldier of Fortune” and his life one of constant change and excitement.
It was a great boast for a horse to say he had been bred in the De Lancey stables, for those De Lanceys, like Mahommed, had been lovers of horses, and their stables and half-mile running track, in the centre of what was so soon to be the very heart of the great city of New York, was the finest in the Northern Colonies before the War of the Revolution.
Gay blades were those De Lanceys, and their rightful inheritance was the sporting blood of old England, though they were, after all, part Huguenot, part Dutch, by ancestry.
Colonel De Lancey, True Briton’s first owner, had married a Mistress Van Courtlandt, whose family had a King and a Bishop at their backs, and occupied half the important posts under the crown. He was a rollicking, generous, reckless gentleman, at home alike in drawing room or on the course, but when, through stress of circumstances, this British officer had to change his mode of living, there was a sale of his horses at John Fowler’s Tavern, near the Tea-Water Pump, in Bowery Lane. All the favorites went but his especial saddle horse, True Briton—who now frankly admitted to his son his worth and beauty in those days. Indeed, he seemed to have no false modesty about it at all, and confessed his superiority over all his stable-mates, even though among them there were such horses as Lath and Slamerkin.
According to the accounts of the old horse his youth had been spent in a time the like of which True could never see. He told of the gaily dressed dandies—waiting on ladies in silks and satins and waving plumes—at the meets; of the sudden seal of disapproval Congress had put upon the dissipations and extravagances of the race-course; of how the Annapolis Jockey Club had set the foolish fashion of economy by closing its course; of how the grass grew up in the one-time splendid Centre Course at Philadelphia.
But of all his anecdotes the tale of how True Briton became a true Patriot interested the young horse most, and ran in this wise:
Colonel De Lancey was stationed at Westchester with his regiment, which was known far and wide as “The Cow-Boys,” because they stole cattle from the “Skinners” (a name given the farmers at that time).
At last the latter resolved to appeal to the Colonel-in-command for a protection of their rights and property. Accordingly, “Skinner Smith” called upon Colonel De Lancey, a white handkerchief tied to a stick, to show a peaceful errand, and made complaint of the depredations of the “Cow-Boys.”
Now the Colonel, ever cool and gay, as became a De Lancey, cried out with a great laugh: