22 THE WILD PONIES OF EXMOOK. 



Knight, pending the completion of a mansion of which 

 the unfinished walls of one wing rise like a dismantled 

 castle from the midst of a grove of trees and orna- 

 mented shrubs. 



A series of gentle declivities, plantations, a winding, 

 full-flowing stream, seem only to require a suitable edi- 

 fice and the hand of an artist gardener to make, at 

 comparatively trifling expense, an abode unequalled in 

 luxuriant and romantic beauty. We crossed the stream 

 not by the narrow bridge, but by the ford ; and, pass- 

 ing through the straggling stone village of Simon's 

 Bath, arrived in sight of the field where the Tattersall 

 of the West was to sell the wild and tame horse stock 

 bred on the moors. It was a field of some ten acres 

 and a half, forming a very steep slope, with the upper 

 path comparatively flat, the sloping side broken by a 

 stone quarry, and dotted over with huge blocks of gra- 

 nite. At its base flowed an arm of the stream we had 

 found margining our route. A substantial, but, as the 

 event proved, not sufficiently high stone fence bounded 

 the whole field. On the upper part, a sort of double 

 pound, united by a narrow neck, with a gate at each end, 

 had been constructed of rails, upwards of five feet in 

 height. Into the first of these pounds, by ingenious 

 management, all the ponies, wild and tame, had been 

 driven. When the sale commenced, it was the duty of 

 the herdsmen to separate two at a time, and drive them 

 through the narrow neck into the pound before the 

 auctioneer. Around a crowd of spectators of every 

 degree were clustered 'squires and clergymen, horse- 

 dealers and farmers, from Northamptonshire and Lin- 

 colnshire, as well as South Devon, and the immediate 

 neighbourhood. 



These ponies are the result of crosses made years 



