Page:Hints to Horse-keepers.djvu/80

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72
PONIES—THEIR DIFFERENT BREEDS.

endurance, with greater strength, greater quickness, and more showy action, of their smaller countrymen.


GALLOWAYS AND NARRAGANSETTS.

After the various descriptions of ponies which have been enumerated and described, there is none more worthy of notice than the peculiar race of small horses, rather than what can be exactly classed as ponies, which formerly existed, nearly identical in all their characteristics, in two small districts of Great Britain, wholly unconnected the one with the other, yet, singularly enough, with names so similar as to justify a first idea of their being in some sort similar or identical. The one of these is the small district of Galloway, on the shores of the Solway Frith, in the south-west of Scotland. The other is a portion of the county of Galway, in the west of Ireland. The whole width of the Irish Sea and of the island itself lies between the two districts, which have, in spite of their similar names, no connection, whether of origin or of population; yet, strange to say, in each locality there is, or rather was—for they have recently become nearly extinct—a peculiar breed of horses wholly different and distinct from the native stock, whether of Scotland or Ireland, yet so similar in all their characteristics and qualifications that their identity of origin cannot be doubted. These are the animals which, from the Scottish district on the border of the counties of Wigton and Kirkcudbright, received the name of Galloways, a word which afterward came to be misapplied to small horses of all descriptions.

In that district they were long famous for their endurance, speed, docility and easiness of gait, as well as for their high and courageous spirit; and so long as the country roads and, indeed, the great national thorough-fares of England and Scotland were such as to render the