king falls he is brought back to trot his last from the lodge gate to the Weldin Oak. From Clamstretch to Clamstretch, is the saying.

I have often witnessed the custom of the Clamstretch, and this time I entered upon it inconspicuously in the magnificent wake of Richard Thomas Corkran. Upon the bare meadow, around the old oak as a nucleus, were gathered many horses. A wild roan mare led the group, a young, untried creature, who kicked and squealed in a nervousness that turned from sudden anger to helpless quaking. A negro at her head, a shining black hand upon her bit, soothed and quieted her with honey upon his tongue and a sturdy desire to thump her in his heart. Her owner, a bewhiskered farmer, stood just beyond the range of her flying heels and looked at her with dismay.

"Now, pettie," he kept saying. "Now, pettie, that ain't no way to behave. That ain't no way."

A hilarious group of friends, in a halfcircle behind him, ridiculed his attempts at reconciliation.

"She ain't your pettie," they shouted. "She's some other feller's. Maybe she ain't got none at all. Give her hell, Jim. . . . Soft stuff's no dope." A large horse, piebald and pretty, looking as if he had been purchased in a toy store, stood next to the virago. Her nervousness was apparently communicated to him, for occasionally he would back and rear. At these times, he raised clouds of dust, which sifted gently over the field, causing a shiver to run down the line of waiting horses.

"Keep 'em horses still," shouted the negro boys. "Hold onto 'em."

One giant black, a colossal hand upon the muzzle of his horse, a mare as dainty and graceful as a fawn, threw out his great chest with pride.

"My lady's a lady," he crooned softly as the other horses stamped and grew restive. "My lady's a lady." The pretty creature looked at him with wide brown eyes, and shook her head as if softly denying.

An animal at the end of the line held my attention. His hide was the color of running bronze. His head might have been struck for one of the horses of Time,

the nostrils flaring and intense, the eyes wild with hint of action. He looked as if he might run with the whirlwind, be bitted to a comet's orbit, and triumph. Sacrilege, it seemed, when I learned that he had never won a race, was quite lacking in the heart that creates a great horse. In him nature was superbly bluffing.

Richard Thomas Corkran stood at some distance from the rank and file. Boredom was unutterably upon him. He seemed looking for a place to lie down and continue his interrupted slumbers, and to be restrained only by the fear that he might be considered gauche. Truly there was nothing in which he might be honestly interested. No horse present could give him even the beginnings of a race. His heaviest work had been done upon the grand circuit in the spring and early summer. Vacation and leisure possessed him for this day at least. True, upon the next day he was to trot a race which was, perhaps, the most important of his career. Now, through the courtesy of the judge, he was the pièce de résistance, the staple, of the evening. At the end of the racing he would trot a heat in solitary grandeur -one heat, not more, and this heat would be preparation for to-morrow's test. Two horses, strategically placed over the straight half-mile, would pace him, but they would have as little to do with his trotting as the distance posts upon the track. A little knot of men, gaping and solemn, had already gathered about him, interpreting his every bored motion as proof positive of his phenomenal speed. He accepted this as his due and was in no manner affected by it.

The men, as always, interested me. A few were professional horsemen, so marked and moulded. They were calm persons, who spoke without gesture or facial expression. Thought flowed soundlessly behind their shrewd eyes. Their attitude was one of continual weighing and balancing of mighty points.

The rest were prosperous farmers, country gentlemen, or honest artisans from the near-by village, all pleasure-bent. The regalia of those who were to drive, or hoped to drive, was unique. They seemed to express their personalities best through high black boots, striped trousers, and flaming calico shirts. The cli

macteric pinnacle was usually reached with an inherited racing-cap, scarlet, ochre, brown, yellow, plaid.

Twilight cupped the world, seeming to grant a hush to earth. The road took on new whiteness, the meadows gradually darkening, touched by the night and the brooding quietness that comes as the sun goes down.

The first race came to a close-a torrent of young horses. The wild-eyed virago was among them, and she won by a prodigious stretching of the neck. Thereat, totally unable to withstand triumph, she bucked and squealed, dragging her sulky, that tormenting appendage, behind her. "Shure, it's temperamental she is," said a Scotch-Irish farmer standing beside me. "But she might have walked in on her hands and won."

The spectacle was dramatic. There was a flurry of horse and man as a race was called, a rushing to the track's edge by the spectators, a happy bustling of self-important officials. From the knots of excited humanity emerged the horses, the drivers with their whips at trail beneath their elbows, their eyes self-consciously upon the ground. Slender sulkies, gossamer-wheeled, were pulled out, tested by heavy thumpings, and attached. Carefully the reins were bitted, run back through the guide-rings, and the drivers swung themselves up. The final touch was the arranging of the horse's tail, and here technique differed. A good driver must sit upon his horse's tail. This is beyond question. The mooted point is whether he shall do so spread or flat. Authority as usual holds both sides, Richard Thomas Corkran absolutely dissenting, for he would allow no one to sit on his tail but himself.

The horses dwindle to specks upon the long white road. The sound of the hoofs dies to faint pulsing in the ears, a shadow of sound. Silence follows, breathless, expectant, broken by the clarion of the start.

The rhythm becomes a rhapsody of pounding hoofs, quick-timed, staccato. A black swirl up the road falls to detail of straining bodies. A roar crescendoes to high shreds of sound as they flash across the finish. A second of tense silence-pandemonium.

Three races of three heats each were trotted. Darkness was drifting down upon us as the last was finished, and Richard Thomas Corkran walked out upon the track.

His small black body blent with the semi-darkness, rendering him almost indistinguishable. The crowd followed him across the track. There was no preparation, no ceremony. The small figure plodded into the graying distance. His pace was scarcely above a walk. He might have been a plough-horse returning from a day of labor. The spectators drew back to the road's edge.

The twilight deepened. We waited in silence. A faint drum of hoofs sounded down the wind. Sharper, swifter, it grew. A black line split the darkness, lengthening so quickly as to vanquish eyesight. There was an incredible twinkling of legs as he passed me, a glimpse of square-set methodical shoulders, which moved with the drive of pistons, of a free floating tail spread to the rushing scythe of air. He finished.

Carefully he stopped, not too sharply lest he strain himself. He turned and plodded toward the oak, where hung his blanket, and as its folds fell upon him he returned to peaceful contemplation.

Came the voice of the announcer, a hoarse bellow through the gloom"Ti-i-ime by the ha-a-alf. Ooone-fivean'-two-fi-i-ifths!!" A roar of applause broke to scattered clapping. Relaxation from the tension expressed itself in laughter, jest, and play. The crowd prepared to go home. The Clamstretch was for that day done.

After dinner Judge Coleman, whose guest I was, and myself walked down the close-cropped green to the paddock fence. A moon had risen, bathing the land in clear pale yellow. Within the paddock and beneath his apple-tree lay Richard Thomas Corkran. He rested upon his side, his small torso rising and falling gently with the even flow of his breath. From his upper lip protruded a straw which moved gently as the air was expelled from his nostrils. Untroubled by thoughts of to-morrow's race, he was again sound asleep.

The next morning I saw him leave his paddock for the fair grounds. A large

truck, whose side just disclosed the upper edge of his rotund, barrelled little body, held him, his three attendants, and his staccato, white and woolly dog. His placid eye fell upon me as he passed, and I saluted and followed him.

The site of the State Fair was a great fenced field upon the outskirts of a nearby city. Upon one side towered a huge grand stand, facing a broad and dusty half-mile track. In the gigantic oval, thus formed, was a smaller ring, tanbarked and barricaded, used at times as a horse-show ring, across a corner of which was now built a small, precarious wooden platform, where vaudeville teams disported themselves in a bedlam of sound for the free edification of the multitude. On the outside of the oval of track, stretched the Midway, in parlance "Mighty," a herd of tents and roughboard shacks, a staggering line, running to a quiet negro graveyard, overgrown with yellow grass and flecked with the gray of forgotten tombstones.

Toward the city in larger tents and squat, unsided buildings, were the farming exhibits, and between these and the outer road the racing stables, flanking a hard-beaten square, in whose centre leaned a rusty pump, dry for years, and used as a hitching-post. Beyond, in a multiplicity of stalls and sties and bins, uncovered to the air, were huge and blooded bulls, monster hogs, and highcrowing, cackling fowl.

Over the wide field hung a haze of dust that stung the nostrils and soaked into the skin, causing a gray change.

I entered through a choked gate into which people streamed as a river banks against a bulwark, a confusion of carriages and cars, walking women with toddling children, red and blue balloons swaying between the ground and the gateposts, flying bits of straw and dust, howling hawkers: a high-pitched excitation of mob.

As I passed through the wooden arch came the sleek backs of racing-horses, surging toward the eight's posts, and the wild foreground of waving arms as the spectators beat against the rail.

The crowd was a sluggish, slow-moving monster, that proceeded with sudden aimless stoppings. It was impossible to

change or alter its spasmodic pace. It rippled into every corner of the field; it ran over fences and beat down barricades. It possessed an attribute of quicksilver in that it could never be gathered or held.

Its sound was a great crushing. It winnowed the grass beneath its feet, and the beaten odor came freshly to my nostrils. Its urged over itself and spun slowly back. It never seemed to break or detach itself into individuals. Its tentacles might loop and cling to various protuberances, but its black bulk moved ever on.

I wandered through the maze of exhibits, stopping and listening where I would. The broad river of crowd divided to smaller eddies that swirled endlessly within and between the long rows of buildings and tents.

I passed glittering rows of farming machinery, red-painted, sturdy, clawed feet hooked into the ground. This bushy-bearded farmers tenderly fingered, and fought bitingly and ungrammatically with one another as to its merits.

A small tractor crawled upon its belly through the mud, and struggled and puffed its way over impossible obstacles. It was followed by a hysterical herd of small boys, who miraculously escaped destruction under its iron treads.

I crossed the square where the lean, cowled racing-horses were led patiently back and forth by the stable boys. Always the crowd was with me, beating its endless, monotonous forward path. I grew to hate it, longed to tear apart its slow viscosity, to sweep it away and clear the earth.

Inside the buildings I passed between endless counters piled high with pyramids of jelly, saw the broad smiles of the presiding housewives, smelt brown loaves of prize bread. Baskets of huge fruit were allotted place, red apples succulent and glowing, fuzzy peaches white and yellow. The presiding deity of the place the veritable mother of all food-I found in the centre of the shack. Her function was the creation of pie, and this of itself seemed to me sufficient. She was a large woman, red-faced, red-handed, and without a curve to her body. She was composed of but two straight lines, and be

tween these lay her solid ample self. Her round fat arms were bare to the elbow and white with flour. On the table before her was an incalculable area of pie-crust, which she kneaded and powdered and cut with deft and stubby fingers. Behind her was a huge charcoal range upon which uncountable pies cooked, and around her were infinite battalions of pies, tremendous legions of pies, gigantic field-armies of pies. Exaggeration itself fell faint.

Before her, in the consummation of a newer miracle, fed the multitude. All men they were, and they ate steadily, unemotionally, as if they might eat eternally. They went from pie to pie to pie. They never ceased, even to wipe their lips. They never stopped to speak. They selected their next pie before they had eaten their last, and reached for it automatically. It was a spectacle so vast as to possess grandeur. Such a woman and such men might have created the world and devoured it in a day.

Around the eaters stood their wives certainly none could have dared be sweethearts-gaping with that curious feminine lack of understanding—awed but unreasonable at such prodigies of feeding.

I came next upon monster hogs, buried deep in the straw. Gruntingly they lifted their battleship bulks and waddled to the walls of the pen in response to the pointed sticks of small boys. The air was permeated with animal odor, occasionally split by the fresh smell of cooking pastry and pungent aromatic spices.

With the Midway, sturdy respectability changed to blowsy, tarnished sin. Gaudy placards in primal colors bellied with the wind. All appeal was sensual, to grotesquerie or chance. From the tent of the "Circassian Syrian Dancing Girls" came the beat of a tom-tom, like that of a heavy pulse. Squarely in the passageway a three-shell merchant had placed his light table and was busily at work.

"Step up, ladies!" he called. "Step up, gents. Th' li'l pea against the world! Match it, an' y' win! You take a chance evury day. When yer born you take a chance, when you marry you take a chance, when you die you take an aw

ful chance. Match me! Match me! Match me!"

His fingers moved like the dartings of a snake's tongue. The tiny pea appeared and disappeared.

"You lost! Poor girl. She lost her quarter. The Lord knows how she got it. Time tells an' you ain't old yet...!"

Beyond, outside a larger tent, sat a mountainous woman, a tiny fringed ballet skirt overhanging her mammoth legs. She was like some giant, jellied organism. To the crowd which gapingly surrounded her she addressed a continual tittering monologue.

'Step up here, baby. . . . Come up, lady! No, I ain't particular even if I am fat. . . . I don't care who looks at me. I'm a lady, I am. Hell, yes! See that man over there?" She swung a monster finger toward a barker. "He keeps me up here. . . . Sure, he does! You jest let me down an' at him-I'll do him inI can make twelve of him!"

Further on the crowd clustered thickly around a small tank, from the end of which rose a tall ladder topped by a tiny platform. So high was the ladder that it seemed to melt into a single line. As I watched, a young man climbed upon the edge of the tank. He grimaced and bowed to the crowd.

He stripped off a beflowered green bathrobe, disclosing a body as sleek as a wet seal's, and like a slender black monkey, climbed the ladder. Reaching the platform, he posed with outstretched arms. The crowd stiffly craned their necks.

At the side of the tank appeared another man with a flat, pock-marked face. There ensued an extraordinary dialogue.

"Leopold Benofoski!" shouted the man beside the tank to him in the air, "Is there any last word that you would like to leave your wife and family?"

"No," shouted the man upon the platform.

"Leopold Benofoski!" shouted the interlocutor. "Are you prepared to meet your fate?"

"Yes," said the young man.

"Then dive!" shouted the other, "-and God be with you!" He hid his face with a prodigious gesture of despair.

The young man drew back his arms until he was like a tightened bow. For

a second he poised upon tensed legs, then, like a plummet, dropped from the edge of the platform. Incredibly, swiftly he flashed down. I caught the glint of his white legs as he hit the water, a high splash, and he had drawn himself out of the other side. A grimace of shining teeth, and he was gone. The crowd, unmoved, went sluggishly on.

Slowly I worked myself through the area before the grand stand, where the crowd was thickest. There had been an accident upon the track: a young horse, "breaking" because of the hard path worn in the finely combed dirt between the turnstiles of the fence and grand stand, had reared and flung its fore legs into the air. A débâcle had followed as the animals close in the ruck had plunged into the leader. Three drivers had been thrown into a thresh of horses. Splintered sulkies and broken shafts lay in the débris, hazed by the cloud of dust. One horse, maddened with fear, had run squealing on, not to be stopped until it had completed the mile. One driver was badly injured.

This had had its effect upon the crowd. An uneasy ripple ran across the grand stand. There was a tinge of hysteria in the movement, a desire to clutch and shiver. As time passed the tension heightened. In the officials' stand I saw the small, staid figure of the judge, peering alertly at the frightened multitude. Then came a consultation of bent heads, and his hand swung up to the cord of the starting bell. The flat clang, for the bell was muffled, beat into the turbulence. A gradual quiet fell.

There followed the announcement of the curtailment of the programme to the immediate race of Richard Thomas Corkran.

I cut my way swiftly through the crowd, back to the stables, for I desired to see the little horse leave the paddock. I found him firmly braced upon stocky legs as they bound his anklets. His refulgent blanket drooped over his rotund torso, and from the striped folds emerged the long, grotesque neck and the absurd hobby-horse head. As I approached he eyed me with droll appreciation, for I seemed always subtly to please him.

As the last anklet was buckled he shook himself. It was a methodical testing to

see that he was entirely in place. Satisfied, he took a few short steps forward, carefully balancing his weight so that no muscle might be strained. At this juncture the white dog, apparently just released from captivity, bounced forward like a lively rubber ball. Fierce was his attack upon the nose of Richard Thomas Corkran. Devious were his advancings and retreatings. Quietly did the little horse receive this adulation. Again he shook himself.

Now was the spider-web tracery of harness put upon him, the silvered racingbridle and the long thin bit. The blanket readjusted, the paddock-gate was opened, and with the small, white dog surging before him, his attendants following, he plodded toward the arena.

As he emerged into the crowd there beat upon him a roar of sound. Like a great wave it ran down the field and reechoed back. It split into individual tendrils that were like pointed spears falling harmless from his small unmoved back. Through the path that opened out before him he slowly went, unnoticing and grave. He entered the weighing ring.

Courteously he stood as his blanket was removed, and he stood bared to the gaze of the three inspecting officials. Then the slender spider-wheeled sulky was pulled up and attached. Suddenly I saw his head lift: the contesting horse had entered the arena.

He was like a legged arrow, a magnificent, straight-lined dart. Thin to the point of emaciation, the bones of his body moved like supple reeds beneath a lustrous skin. Lightly muscled was he, tenuous skeins at his wrists and hocks. He looked as if he might drift before the wind.

He was very nervous. There was a continual thin white line across his nostrils as his high chest took air. A rippling shiver ran through him.

Richard Thomas Corkran was the first to leave the ring. Never had he taken his eyes from his opponent. His small, black muzzle remained fixed, imperturbable. Slowly he plodded out upon the track.

The flat sound of the bell, calling the race, drifted down from above my head. As I fought my way to the rail, the roar of the crowd rose to frenzy. The horses