Page:Horses and roads.djvu/124

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108
HORSES AND ROADS

shoe made on professor Coleman’s principle. It is not a ‘patent’ shoe.

At the beginning of March, as ‘Will Watch’[1] says, farming operations are too backward to allow of reducing the work of farm horses sufficiently to do away at once with all iron on their feet; neither did the writer intend, for many reasons, to incite the owners of such hard-worked animals to make such an abrupt change. A gradual mode of proceeding will allow the horses to keep on at their work; and it will not cause so much apprehension to the owner nor so much opposition and eternal grumbling, or ‘kicking over the traces’ on the part of the carter, especially when he has such a handsome inducement held out to him, in case of success, as ‘half the saving in the blacksmith’s bill,’ which this gentleman so spiritedly offers him.

Unfortunately, as he remarks in his letter, farriers do not, as a rule, ‘care to know much about the Charlier shoe,’ and this has already been pointed out in these articles. Yet one gentleman has written that he has made of one ‘an ardent disciple,’ and that ‘he shoes beautifully’ on this system; also that he finds it to bring grist to his mill. In some places where farmers could carry out by union what has been before suggested, a man might be found who would be willing to go into the thing. However, where the difficulty about the Charlier system is insurmountable, there is another road out of the wood, which ‘Aberlorna’ appears to have already hit upon,

  1. See Appendix B.