240 THE POST AND THE PADDOCK. 



&c., and the most paying colour is a brown or a 

 " Jersey bay." This class of animal does not come 

 there so much from the county of Durham as for- 

 merly, but is principally bred in the neighbourhood 

 of Howden and Holderness. The breeders of Dur- 

 ham horses confine themselves more to Northallerton 

 and Newcastle fairs, which are also the great marts 

 for the Cumberland men. The latter, although they 

 kept the first and second blood-sire prizes against 

 all comers, with Ravenhill and British Yeoman, and 

 made the other horse-classes considerably less of a 

 dead letter than they had hitherto been, at the 1855 

 Royal Agricultural Show, breed almost solely for the 

 carriage, and hence it is next to useless to bring a 

 chesnut horse, however fine his points, in the county. 

 "When Mr. Richard Fergusson, the owner of Raven- 

 hill (who has been re-christened " Royal Ravenhill," 

 in token of his triumph), introduced a coaching- 

 sire some seven- and-thirty years ago, he was assured 

 by his neighbours that the climate was too cold 

 either Tor pure short-horns or anything in horse's 

 shape, that was more than half-bred ; and it was only 

 when he sold a pair of his four-year-old Candidates 

 for 150, which shortly afterwards reached the King's 

 stables for, as it was said at the time, 300, that a 

 contrary conviction dawned on them. Candidate, Bay 

 Chilton, and Grand Turk, who were all Northern 

 Lights in their time, had very little blood, but were fine 

 sturdy specimens of a species of Durham or rather 

 Yorkshire coaching -horse, which is now almost entirely 

 superseded by thorough-breds. In size they were a 

 medium between Magog and Lord Faueonberg, but 

 decidedly the finest type of a coach horse we ever saw 

 was a brown one by Screveton. The light-boned Equa- 

 tor, the elegant little Royalist, and the flashy-looking 

 high-tempered Corinthian did very little towards im- 

 proving the breed, which was principally kept up by the 

 travels of The Earl and Gregson, a remarkably fine 



