FAMOUS CHASERS AND THEIR RIDERS. 385 



Mr. Yates was in his best day remarkably strong in the saddle, 

 courageous and determined. A horse might be trusted to run 

 up to his form when Mr. Yates was riding, and he never lost his 

 head. One race ridden by this fine horseman will be long re- 

 membered. The scene was Croydon, and the animal, Harold 

 by name, came down heavily at the brook. The horse was up 

 first, but not by much. Mr. Yates ran after him, caught him 

 by the tail before he could set off, hung on, covering some 

 distance of ground in this eccentric fashion, and finally suc- 

 ceeding in getting into the saddle again, won the race. Extreme 

 familiarity with the animal in the stable, on its training-ground 

 during and after schooling, as well as on the racecourse, went 

 far to explain Mr. Yates' exceptional success as a rider. 



Captain Arthur Smith was an extraordinarily bold horse- 

 man, and retained his nerve in a way rarely seen. In 1864 he 

 won the Grand National Hunt Steeple-chase on Game Chicken, 

 in a field of twenty- eight runners. There was no better man 

 to hounds. A good many years since it is recorded of Captain 

 Smith that he jumped a fence into a gravel-pit, five-and-tw^nty 

 feet deep, and a terror-stricken farmer, who knew the country, 

 rode up to the spot in horrified apprehension. When he 

 arrived he found the man, whose shattered body he had 

 expected to see at the bottom, quietly making his way up the 

 slope out of the pit. ' Well, sir, you were not born to be 

 killed out hunting ! ' was the only remark the farmer could 

 make. 



In the knack of getting over fences the quickest and 

 shortest way. Captain Smith has been excelled by only a few 

 past-masters of the art. Mr. Brockton has also been denied the 

 highest honour — for, in spite of the chance which sometimes 

 throws a Grand National in a man's way, while infinitely better 

 riders cannot add their names to the roll, it is so esteemed. 

 The Grand National Hunt Steeple-chase fell to him in 1868, 

 and he won many others that year. Mr. Brockton is a good 

 horseman over a big country, and probably owes not a little of 

 his success to a point which was insisted on in the chapter on 



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