BREEDING OF HUNTERS. 245 



purchased privately, and join the main string at a 

 certain place of rendezvous ; but scarcely half of them 

 reach his London stables, as he now has a show of 

 them both at Newark and Barnet, where purchasers 

 and brother- dealers attend to cull. He always buys 

 according to what is required for the particular sea- 

 son ; and if the dwellers in Mount-street were to lose 

 sight of their almanacks and the swallows, they would 

 know that spring had come again by the endless sup- 

 ply of stout cobs and park hacks which would, week 

 after week, take up their fleeting habitation among 

 them. Mr. Thomas Sell acts as London salesman for 

 Mr. Collins, who, along with his fidus Achates, James 

 Brewster, visits every great fair out of the 190 odd 

 which the trade professes to frequent, not only in the 

 midland counties and the north, but in Oxfordshire, 

 Wiltshire, and, in short, wherever he can get a wind- 

 scent of a likely horse. He is a striking instance of 

 what honesty and good judgment can do for a man. 

 It is little more than fifteen years since we remember 

 him driving his roan pony to Osborne's, in Gray's 

 Inn-lane, to buy " machiners" ; and his rise since 

 then, through the successive stages of Aldridge's and 

 TattersalFs, to be the wholesale Leviathan of the 

 trade, has been wonderfully steady and rapid. The 

 pretty general belief among the initiated is, that he 

 sells upwards of eleven hundred animals in the course 

 of the year, at an average of SQ a-piece ; and, as a 

 type of the universality of his business, we may men- 

 tion that, as we lately strolled through his stables, we 

 espied a first-class hunter almost cheek by jowl with 

 a spotted cob, who looked quite ripe for the jocular 

 society of the late Tom Barry over the way. All the 

 great London dealers purchase from him ; and their 

 French brethren, Benedick, Crimeaux, Angell, &c., 

 are among his largest customers, and occasionally go 

 as high as 170 for a riding horse. 



Mr. Joseph Anderson is also at the very top of the 



