4 THE POST AND THE PADDOCK. 



crowd which attends Manchester Races is something 

 past belief; but they seem to go much more because 

 it is the conventional mode of passing the Whitsun- 

 tide week, than from any constitutional interest in 

 race-horses. Before there was a railway from Liver- 

 pool to Aintree, the very mud-carts used to be 

 pressed into the service for the day, and sixpence 

 there and sixpence back was the tariff. A fiddler 

 and twelve or thirteen mates, male and female, were 

 squeezed into that narrow compass. On one occa- 

 sion (1843), we were passing along the footpath, 

 when a troop of these Bacchanals sturdily refused to 

 alight at the entrance of Liverpool ; but in an instant 

 the linch-pin was drawn, and they were all shot out. 

 Their fiddler, nothing daunted, rallied them like 

 another Tyrtseus, and the dancing went on merrily 

 in the dusty road, till the next vehicle rudely broke 

 the ring. We doubt whether one of them had looked 

 at a race that day. 



A blood-horse, on the contrary, has always been 

 the idol of Yorkshiremen, who were the first to 

 chronicle his deeds; and attendance on his race- 

 course levees is an honest broad-bottomed custom 

 which they will never resign. Before the South 

 Yorkshire line was opened, the Sheffielders, man and 

 boy, thought nothing, year after year, of walking 

 through the night to Doncaster, taking up a good 

 position next the rails, which they never quitted from 

 ten to five, and then walking the eighteen miles 

 home again; and till within the last fou*r years, a 

 Devonshire man used always to make a St. Leger 

 pilgrimage both ways on foot; and accounted for 

 this strange whim on the grounds that his " grand- 

 mother was Yorkshire/' They do not care so much 

 to come if it is an open race, but love best to see a 

 Derby winner stripped to hold his own. One very 

 glorious occasion, when there was a remarkable 

 crush, " the hardware youths," on their return to the 



