The Township's Race Day.

In my young days when nearly everyone in the country used a horse, and when country people had to rely on their own resources for amusement and recreation, the township's annual race meeting was a popular and pleasant institution. There was a comfortable picnic air about it that made it a gathering for young and old. Farmers and their sons rode their own horses, Maoris rode their horses too; and I remember one meeting on the Upper Waikato frontier at which our doughty neighbour, Te Kooti, of warrior fame, entered a horse of his own; and one of his young Hau-haus rode it. That helped to cement the newly-made friendship between the races. Sport is a great leveller of barriers and animosities.

Racing to-day, centralised on the large city courses, has become a business rather than a sport. Anything that will tend to decentralise it, and to restore the small sports meetings in the country, the more the better, will be a change for the better, a healthy revival of the olden pride of locality and interest in the breeding of good horses.