358 STEEPLE-CHASING. 



ally shows what sort of a horse he was. Speaking of his 

 owner, Mr. John Elmore, the delightful author of ' Scott and 

 Sebright ' says : 



Grimaldi, Lottery, Jerry (winner in 1840), Gaylad (1S42), The 

 Weaver, Sam Weller, and British Yeoman, bore the ' blue and 

 black cap' in turn ; but Lottery was the only one he cared to talk 

 much about. His friends used to laugh at this ' Horncastle horse,' 

 who was lamed with larking the day he got him, but he always 

 said, ' You may laugh — you'll see it come out ; ' and well was his 

 patience rewarded. When the horse had ceased to defy creation 

 with Jem Mason under thirteen stone seven, if ever a friend went 

 down for an afternoon with 'Jack' to Uxendon, he would order 

 him to be saddled. 'Hang it!' he would say, 'have you never 

 been on the old horse ? — get up ! ' and be the ground ever so hard, 

 or the fences ever so blind, he would insist on their backing him, 

 one after the other, if there were half a dozen of them. He would 

 turn him over anything ; and occasionally it would be the iron 

 hurdles between the garden and the paddock, or, for lack of a 

 handier fence, he would put the rustic garden chairs together. 



Tom Olliver won three Grand Nationals, and other races all 

 over the country. He taught that admirable horseman the late 

 Captain Little much of the jockeyship which he so often turned 

 to account ; but as a horseman he was far inferior to Mason, 

 and, there is reason to suppose, frankly recognised his inferiority. 

 As a boy Olliver had a hard life in the service of a horse-coper, 

 in whose establishment saddles were scarce, and the lad did 

 most of his riding on barebacked animals ; but a3 a child he 

 had displayed a passion for riding, had never been so happy as 

 when on a donkey, and is spoken of as going wonderfully well 

 to hounds on a broken-kneed grey mare. 



His first public essay was at Finchley, on a mare called 

 Columbine, and it ended in his falling into a ditch and being 

 laid up for six weeks, for which efforts and accidents he was 

 rewarded and compensated with one sovereign. He had the 

 most fervent admiration for Captain Becher, the sponsor of 

 Becher's Brook, and his delight was extreme when at Clifton, 

 over hurdles, he beat his idol by a head. Afterwards he dis- 



