his extraordinary powers. His training remains a legend in the
annals of the stables of Royal-Lieu, where the jockeys will tell you
how he completely knocked all the other horses out of time, and how two
or three of the very best put in relay to wait upon him were not enough
to cover the distance. Fille-de-l'Air herself had to be sacrificed, and
it was in one of these terrible gallops that she finished her career as
a runner. Mandarin alone stood out, but even he, they say, showed such
mortal terror of the trial that when he was led out to accompany his
redoubtable brother he trembled from head to foot, bathed in sweat. In
1865, Gladiateur gained the two thousand guineas and the Derby at
Epsom, and for the first time the blue ribbon was borne away from the
English. "When Gladiateur runs," said the English papers at this time,
"the other horses hardly seem to move." The next month he ran for the
Grand Prix de Paris. His jockey, Harry Grimshaw, had the coquetry to
keep him in the rear of the field almost to the end, as if he were
taking a gallop for exercise, and when Vertugadin reached the last turn
the favorite, some eight lengths behind, seemed to have forgotten that
he was in the race at all. The public had made up its mind that it had
been cheated, when all at once the great horse, coming up with a rush,
passed all his rivals at a bound, to resume at their head his former
easy and tranquil pace. There had not been even a contest: Gladiateur
had merely put himself on his legs, and all had been said. These three
victories brought in to Comte de Lagrange the sum of four hundred and
forty-one thousand seven hundred and twenty-five francs, to say nothing
of the bets. Gladiateur afterward won the race of six thousand metres
(two miles fourteen furlongs) which now bears his name, and also the
Great St. Leger at Doncaster. He was beaten but once--in the
Cambridgeshire, where he was weighted at a positively absurd figure,
and when, moreover, the track was excessively heavy. After his
retirement from the turf he was sold in 1871 for breeding purposes in
England for two hundred thousand francs, and died in 1876.

Like M. Fould and several other brethren of the turf, Comte de Lagrange
felt the discouragements of the Franco-German war, and sold all his
horses to M. Lefevre. Fortunately, however, he had retained in his stud
at Dangu a splendid lot of breeding-mares, and with these he has since
been able to reconstruct a stable of t