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H0W THE GREAT HERMIS WAS TRAINED. Alex Shields Worked the Great Little Horse Between Shafts of a Sulky. Hermis. winner of the Cup Preliminary and the Brighton Cup of 1903. trained in the winter of 1903 -04 feir his triumphs in the Suburban. Brookdah-and Test Handicaps ,,f 1904 between the shaft! of a sulky. The legs of this great little horse, which is now somewhere in France, were under suspicion at the- close of the racing season of 1903. Hermis was a horse of unusual huskiness and a gn.ss feeder. How to keep his weight down over winter was the problem that confronted the late Ales Shields, his trainer. Realizing that it would be well nigh impossible to accomplish this end without breaking the horse down permanently if Hermis was galloped undir weight over the oh] Gravusend track like other horses. Shields decided to try him out in a sulky. Major Thomas clay McDowell had trained Allan .1 Dale at Memphis for the Kentucky Derby of 1902 by driving him to a buggy for months ahead id the running of the race, and Allan-a-Dale had not only stood for the Derby, but for a number of other races. If Hermis. a Brighton Cup winner, resenting the suggestion of such menial employment as pulling a wheeled vehicle, had kicked Shields fine new sulky to kindling wood no one about the stable would have been surprised. IDrmis was a horse e.f spirit as well as of speed. But he did no such thing. At the first asking he trotted off with his sulky as placidly as a veteran cab horse might have-. and put in most of the winter of 1903 -04, a winter of unusual severity and almost continuous snow about New York, dragging William Shields, who weighed 2S0 pounds, or Williams HOO-pound brother John, up ami down the spe-edway of the Brooklyn boulevard in a sbdgh.
