have said, has been raised since 1872, as it has been in America.

But let us come back to our Norman circuit, which this digression about
time and trotting interrupted at Rouen. The sleepy old mediaeval town on
this occasion rouses itself from its dreams of the past and awakens to
welcome the crowd of Norman farmers who come flocking in, clad for the
most part in the national blue blouse, but still bearing about their
persons those unmistakable though quite indescribable marks by which the
turfman can recognize at a glance and under any costume the man whose
business is with horses. Every trade and calling in life perhaps may be
said to impart to its followers some distinguishing peculiarity by which
the brethren of the craft at least will instinctively know each other;
and amongst horse-fanciers these mysterious signs of recognition are as
infallible as the signals of Freemasonry. As one penetrates still
farther into Normandy on his way to the Caen races--which come off a few
days after those at Rouen--one becomes still more alive to the fact that
he is in a great horse-raising country. It is indeed to the departments
of Calvados and the Orne beyond all other places that we owe those fine
Norman stallions of which so many have been imported into America. In
the Pin stud, at the fairs of Guibray and of Montagne, one may see the
descendants of the colossal Roman-nosed horses of Merlerault and
Cotentin which used to bear the weight of riders clad in iron, and which
figure at a later day in the pictures of Van der Meulen. The infusion of
English blood within the present century, and particularly during the
Second Empire, has profoundly modified the character of the animal
known to our ancestors: the Norman, with the rest of the various races
once so numerous in France, is rapidly disappearing, and it will not be
very long before two uniform types only will prevail--the draught-horse
and the thoroughbred.

The race-course at Caen is one of the oldest in France, having been
established as long ago as 1837. The most important events of its
programme are the Prix de la Ville (handicap), with premium and stakes
amounting to twenty or twenty-five thousand francs, on which the
heaviest bets of the intermediate season are made, and the Grand St.
Leger of France, which before the war took place at Moulins, and which
is far from being of equal importance with the celebrated race at
Doncaster whose name it bears. The site of the tra