SHREWDNESS IN A BARGAIN 253 



keen in all business connected with his stable. My 

 experience did not in any way go to show that, in the 

 fifteen years or so during which Lord William had raced 

 before I was privileged to know him, he may not have 

 displayed all that shrewdness with which he was 

 credited in the matter of bargaining, his knowledge of 

 what he was about putting those who dealt with him at 

 a disadvantage. A simple recital of the particulars of 

 the transactions I had with him will best show whether 

 or not I came the worse off of the two in these dealings, 

 which, so far as his lordship was concerned, were always 

 carried out with scrupulous exactitude. 



Whatever may have been Lord William's tendency to 

 free expenditure on his personal pleasures, he was not, 

 so far as I am aware, given to extravagance of any kind 

 in connection with his stables, although he was not, as 

 will be seen, unwilling to pay a fair price for a good 

 horse. To his jockeys, at all events, he paid only the 

 regulation fee. In so doing he may have acted with the 

 laudable desire of giving offence to no one, feeling that 

 if he did otherwise, he would of a certainty offend many 

 without satisfying the recipients of his bounty like 

 Louis XIV., in fact, who in restricting his liberality de- 

 fended the action by saying, ' When I give away a place, 

 I make a hundred discontented, and one ungrateful.' 

 Nevertheless, in the matter of gifts, we may, as I have 

 had reason to show more than once, have worse examples 

 set our aristocracy in the treatment of their jockeys than 

 those handed down to us by the noble lord. 



The very fact, as shown in this case, of his care not to 

 open his purse-strings too wide in the rewards given to 

 those who rode for him, is a proof that he possessed that 

 certain intuitive good sense which looks after pounds, 

 shillings, and pence ; and the possession of this he again 



