“If you meet one of the Faithful in the Desert mounted on a kochlani, and he shall say to you, ‘God bless you!’ before you can say, ‘And God’s blessing be upon you!’ he shall be out of sight.”
True learned how to judge a horse by his color through Arabian tradition.
“White is for princes, but these do not stand the heat; black brings good fortune, but fears rocky ground; chestnut is most active—if one tells you he has seen a horse ‘fly in the air,’ and the horse be chestnut, believe him!”
There was a pause, during which True anxiously waited to hear what was said of bays.
Finally he asked.
“They say,” answered his father, with a certain natural pride, “that ‘bay is hardiest and best.’ If one tells you he has seen a horse ‘leap to the bottom of a precipice without hurting himself,’ and if he say ‘bay,’ believe him!”
And being bay, True was happy.
“The Arab,” continued the father, “who lives with his horse, and prizes him above his family, as is most meet and proper, learns to know him well. There are those in the Desert to-day who claim to trace the lineage of their horses back to those of Mohammed. These they train to endure hunger, fatigue and thirst to stand the Desert life. Some are said to be able to travel eighty leagues in twenty-four hours.”
There were modern incidents in Beautiful Bay’s lore—tales of the Southern States—so lately colonies—told him by his famous father, Traveller, who was imported from England and owned by Colonel Tayloe of Virginia.
“The blood of a thoroughbred flows quicker on the course than on a hill-side farm,” said the old horse, and related a story of the meet at Annapolis, when he and Colonel De Lancey went down from New York to visit The Dulaney of Maryland.