“Every species of fence every horse doesn’t suit,
What’s a good country hunter may here prove a brute,”
Sings that clerical bard who wrote the Billesdon-Coplow poem, from which I have already quoted; and it would be difficult to explain more tersely than do these two lines the difference between a fair useful hunter, and the flyer we call par excellence “a Leicestershire horse!”
Alas! for the favourite unrivalled over Gloucestershire walls, among Dorsetshire doubles, in the level ploughs of Holderness, or up and down the wild Derbyshire hills, when called upon to gallop, we will say, from Ashby pastures to the Coplow, after a week’s rain, at Quorn pace, across Quorn fences, unless he happens to possess with the speed of a steeple-chaser, the courage of a lion and the activity of a cat! For the first mile or two “pristinæ virtutis haud immemor” he bears him gallantly enough, even the unaccustomed rail on the far side of an “oxer,” elicits but a startling exertion, and a loud rattle of horn and iron against wood, but ere long the slope rises against him, the ridge-and-furrow checks his stride, a field, dotted with ant-hills as large as church-hassocks and not unlike them in shape, to catch his toes and impede his action, changes his smooth easy swing to a laborious flounder, and presently at a thick bullfinch on the crest of a grassy ridge, out of ground that takes him in nearly to his hocks, comes the crisis. Too good a hunter to turn over, he gets his shoulders out and lets his rider see the fall before it is administered, but down he goes notwithstanding, very effectually, to rise again after a struggle, his eye wild, nostril distended, and flanks heaving, thoroughly pumped out!
He is a good horse, but you have brought him into the wrong country, and this is the result.
It would be a hopeless task to extract from young Rapid’s laconic phrases, and general indifference, any particulars regarding the burst in which, to give him his due, he has gone brilliantly, or the merits of the horse that carried him in the first flight without a mistake. He wastes his time, his money, his talents, but not his words. For him and his companions, question and answer are cut short somewhat in this wise:—
“Did you get away with them from the Punchbowl?”
“Yes, I was among the lucky ones.”
“Is, ‘The King of the Golden Mines’ any use?”
“I fancy he is good enough.”
And yet he is reflecting on the merits of Self and Co. with no little satisfaction, and does not grudge one shilling of the money—a hundred down, and a bill for two hundred and fifty—that the horse with the magnificent name cost him last spring.