THE CIRCUS AND THE ARAB STEED.
HOMER DAVENPORT, fresh from the Arabian Desert, where he journeyed in the interests of the Woman's Home Companion, shatters another fond delusion of our circus days. He tells us in an article, "The Arab Horse in Legend and Story," appearing in the April Woman's Home Companion, that the piebald horses utilized in the tented shows are not Arabs at all, but are products of the domestic field. But here is the tragic story in his own words: "Circuses are perhaps more to blame for the misrepresentation of the Arab horse than any other source. A friend of mine owns a circus, and I saw his posters a few years ago, claiming to exhibit eighteen or twenty of the only Arabian horses brought to America. He said they were captured with great difficulty, and brought to New York by special permit of the Sultan; that they were of the family known in history as the Eagle Feather Horses, so much prized in the Queen of Sheba's days; that they were snow white with big markings in their spots of the tip of eagle feathers. We don't have to believe everything we read on the circus posters. In this case I am mighty certain these 'spotted Arabians' were bought at Albany, Oregon. The most peculiar part of this spotted-horse business is this, and it is not a very strange reason when you know it, that spotted anything is created by a mixture of different races, or different breeds, and that likely accounts for the fact that the Arabian Desert in all its history has never produced a spotted, or piebald, horse; possibly from the fact that there is never any mixture of blood."