Page talk:Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1892).djvu/337

A Two-Forty Gait.
"Two-Forty" (in Douglass's page heading) is a 19th Century way of rating a horse's speed. As mentioned at Wikipedia, "Jingle Bells": Two forty refers to a mile in two minutes and forty seconds at the trot, or 22.5 miles per hour. This is a good speed, and suggests the desired horse of that era was a type later known as a Standardbred. I did not wish to add a wikilink directly to the song "Jingle Bells", as that might seem flippant, but if someone can find a brief article on units of velocity, please do add a wikilink to it. — Plan9fromInnerSpace (talk) 19:30, 3 December 2021 (UTC)