RACING SERVANTS: OLD STYLE AND NEW. 99 



action as portrayed on canvas, could hardly have compassed 

 in the whole of a racing season those terrible four-mile courses 

 whereon history avers they were wont to perform in heats 

 during a summer's afternoon. 



A rigid disciplinarian, too, was he in all matters of stable 

 observances and etiquette, and he would as soon have thought 

 of starting a horse for a race with his mane unplaited as he 

 would of pretermitting his own evening beaker of hot and 

 strong. But the old order passeth away, and the long-coated 

 functionary, with his breeches and gaiters, and his system of 

 everlasting sweats, has been replaced by a very different being, 

 by a revolutionised management. The wolds and the downs 

 resound as of yore under the hoof of the thoroughbred, for 

 Newmarket has not yet swept all the turf sheep (white and 

 black) into her mighty fold; and the old dwellings, nestling in 

 the shelter of coombes and dells, are, in outward appearance 

 at least, but little altered; yet the thatched stabling (the thresh- 

 ing machine having extinguished the thatcher's craft) has given 

 way to ranges of slate-roofed edifices with all the modern 

 improvements of ventilation, iron mangers and troughs, tiled 

 floors, and drainage, or no drainage, of the latest sanitary and 

 scientific pattern. 



The trainer himself, even in the farthest provinces, is more 

 changed than his surroundings, though at Newmarket can be 

 observed to greatest advantage the latter-end-of-nineteenth- 

 century master of the horse. The 'boss,' as his lads call him, 

 pursues his avocation in circumstances wholly dissimilar to 

 those under which his predecessors of the past generation 

 flourished. To begin with, he cannot train on the Heath at 

 all without license duly applied for and obtained from the 

 Stewards of the Jockey Club, and the where and when of 

 his gallops, trials, and exercise are regulated by the official 

 appointed for that special purpose. 



But let us suppose our trainer fairly established with — as 

 may well be the case — from fifty to a hundred horses under 

 his care, the property of some ten different owners, seldom 



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