Page:Horse shoes and horse shoeing.djvu/170

 at the chateau of the Counts of Champagne (fig. 24). It is catalogued as being of the sixteenth century; but this is evidently an error; it does not belong to that, nor yet to very many previous centuries. In a French antiquarian publication, it is mentioned that when destroying a fig. 24 Roman bridge to construct the Canal de Bourgogne 'there was found in the joints of the stones forming the body of the chaussee, a horse-shoe. Unfortunately no description is given.

The Abbé Cochet mentions a small shoe with six nail-holes and uneven border, which was obtained from the marshes of Dompierre-sur-la-Somme. It resembled that found at Chavannes by M. Troyon. The collection of M. Houbigant, at Nogent-les-Vierges, contains several antique shoes, but the Abbé says nothing of their origin, save that one of them, belonging to a mule (?), and with six nail-holes, was fished up in the river Oise, in 1842, not far from Creil, where the same antiquarian had fixed the Roman station of Litanobriga. The other shoes were collected, to the number of one hundred and fifty, not far from a Roman road at Nogent-les-Vierges. They had a fullering or groove around their circumference, and were so small that it was supposed they were intended rather for mules than horses.