THE RETURN MATCH. 



It was the last meeting likely to be held under the management 

 of the Redmarshall Race Committee. For years the enthralling 

 subject of removing the meeting from Brackenlea to Snipey 

 Willie's meadows, a peaty piece of ground nearer the enterpris- 

 ing town of Redmarshall, had afforded the public-spirited con- 

 troversialists of the place an unfailing excuse for publishing their 

 clinchers in the impartial columns of the local press. For years 

 the duty which the Corporation of Redmarshall owed to the 

 burgesses in respect of this much-desired change had been in- 

 termittently dwelt upon (chiefly at public meetings) by the repre- 

 sentatives of the North-East Ward, near which ambitious section 

 of the borough Snipey Willie's piece of boggy land was situated. 

 Even the local poet had been enlisted in the popular cause. 



• Brackenlea's a barren spot 

 With one solitary cot ; 

 Snipey Willie's meadows are 

 More commodious by far.' 



was a quatrain that carried conviction to the mind of every 

 unbiassed reader, and might, peradventure, have eventually car- 

 ried the question if the Fates, in the shape of a railway company 

 on the one hand, and a far-seeing builder on the other, had not 

 intervened. Brackenlea was wanted by the company, and the 

 bog by the builder. Whereupon the race-committee advertised 

 their last meeting. 



Up at the Hurst, Mr. Hugh Winpenny's place, on the evening 

 before the races, these were naturally the leading topics of con- 

 versation. As they were, too, at Redmarshall, over the mahogany 

 of Captain Wolviston, R.N., and likewise at Brackenlea Park, 

 Lord Hart's place. Although returning two members, a Whig 

 and a Tory, Redmarshall, which was a fiery furnace of party 

 feeling at election times, took no account of political differences 

 of opinion during the races. Those were drowned, as it were, 



