74 THE POST AND THE PADDOCK. 



triplet which says that "Thrice the life of a horse is 

 the life of a man/' and so on to stags and eagles in 

 geometric progression. Mr. Kirby, of York, who is 

 the oldest living exporter of horses, did a great busi- 

 ness with them for about half a century. This won- 

 derful octogenarian first set foot at Cronstadt in 1791, 

 when he was little more than twenty-one, in charge 

 of a string of horses, which a speculative Market 

 "Weighton brewer sent out at a venture, and repeated 

 his visits till he was nearly sixty, bearing with him 

 on Jiis dreary three-weeks' voyages the choicest blood 

 of Yorkshire. As his business increased, he gene- 

 rally chartered a vessel there and back again, and on 

 one occasion he took out no less than forty -two in 

 the Mary Frances. They were stabled in the hold 

 on the ballast- sand, and each of them was allowed a 

 stall of six feet by four and a-half, while the whole 

 space devoted to them was seven feet high, and well 

 ventilated through the hatches. What with stall fit- 

 tings, corn, hay, straw, water-casks, and freight, they 

 each cost about 10 on the voyage. He only lost 

 one of them at sea during the whole of his journey- 

 ings; but as if to make up for it, fourteen were 

 drowned in his sale stables in one night, by a sudden 

 inundation of the Neva. These were not his only 

 perils on Russian soil. He had once scarcely bedded 

 up a lot for the night, after their walk from Cron- 

 stadt to St. "Petersburg, and written circulars to his 

 principal customers, who, like the Emperor Alexan- 

 der, were wont to convert his stables into a sporting 

 lounge, than he received notice that the Emperor 

 Paul had ordered all the English ships to be seized. 

 The fact of his being a well-known character in Rus- 

 sia saved him from being personally annoyed as his 

 countrymen were ; but still he felt so apprehensive 

 lest his horses should be confiscated, that he deter- 

 mined to sell everything off at once. Accordingly 

 he asked Count Kotoschpin, who had been betimes 



