IN SEARCH OF A HORSE. 39 



horse seemed to correspond with my wishes, and on 

 trial he suited my taste. " What is the figure ?" 

 "Twenty pounds." My suspicions were awakened, 

 but I said nothing. He went freely, and neither 

 stumbled nor shied. I gave him the reins and gal- 

 loped him above a mile, most of it at speed. His 

 wind was good ; he was aged, but showed no symp- 

 toms of over-work. I could not detect unsoundness, 

 and I bought him, warranted. The next day he 

 walked against a brick-wall, and for the first time I 

 discovered that he was blind ! yet it was only 

 scientific inspection that could have found even a 

 blemish in his eyes. Blindness is not unsoundness 

 in horse-dealing law, whatever it might be deemed by 

 Sir James Mansfield : I therefore sold him and sus- 

 tained no loss ; on the contrary I gained, as in a 

 former instance, a valuable lesson for nothing. 



I am selecting the most instructive cases only 

 and therefore pass by scores of other mishaps like 

 this. I ran the gauntlet through Osborn's, Tatter- 

 sail's, and the Bazaar, and between the one and the 

 other learnt that in a horse-dealer's estimation, un- 

 soundness does not and cannot exist — in a farrier's 

 judgment every horse in creation is unsound unless 



