SOME CURIOUS BACKS.

Otago Witness, Issue 2516, 4 June 1902, Page 48

SOME CURIOUS BACKS.

Not long ago a writer in Baily's Magazine described some horses with abnormal backs, which horses were as good as any rhat ever looked through bridie. One such animal was Lord Lonsdale'h Gradient, whose back fell in in the most extraordinary fashion just behind the withers, and three white legs and a white faco contributed to make Gradient about as ugly a creature as could be. Yet when Lord Lousdale gave up the Quorn country in 1898, and sent his stud to Tatersall's, he put a reserve of six hundred guineas on this horse, who required a saddle stuffed to three timos the ordinary depth over the trees to fit him. Even more remarkably mis-made was an Irish hunter named Old Joe, which belonged to Mr Hall-Dare, of Newtownbarry. An ordinary saddle would have regted on the withers and loins, leaving space between for "half a truss of hay ;" but Old Joe was going strong at 16 years old, and having been fitted with a saddle to suit him, was as safe and fast a conveyance as there was in Counties Carlow, Wexford, or Meath, where Mr Hall-Dare hunted him, and wa<3 not b© bought at any price. He won two point-to-point races in the best of company, and was the only horse that saw the great Mountainstown run in Meath, in 1896, through from start to finish, when Mr J. Watson, whose third horse was beaten, saw the end of his back. Mr Atherton Brown's Koughside, who won the Chester Cup of 1900, had a back deformed in the opposite direction, boasting the most pronounced roach-back ever seen on a racehorse that earned bracket*!.