347 



myself of copying the example of the Mechanics' 

 Institutes, and engaging a lecturer ; and no one 

 seemed so fitted as that great Professor of rough- 

 riding, the veteran Dick Christian,* to tell how horses 

 were tamed and how fields were won. It was on a 

 cold frosty evening, early last January, that I first 

 met the Professor by a comfortable fireside at Mel- 

 ton, and drew forth my trusty steel pen to report his 

 lectures. I had never seen him before, and certainly 

 seventy-eight winters have dealt gently with him. 

 There he sat, the same light-legged sturdy five- 

 foot-six man, with apparently nearly all that mus- 

 cular breadth of chest and vigour of arm which 

 enabled him in his hey-day to lift a horse's fore- 

 quarters as high, if not higher, over a fence, than any 

 man who ever rode to hounds. He seemed to be 

 anxious to jump off at score upon his great Marigold 

 feat, the account of which had just been cut out of 

 an old newspaper and sent him by a friend ; but I 

 called him back, and asked him what sort of boy he 

 was, and got him well-away on that theme from the 

 post at last. 



Cottesmore was my native place, when Sir Horace 

 Mann kept his harriers there. Father would have 

 me made a scholar, but I was all for horses : they 

 were still my hobby. In room of going to school, I 

 always slipped down to the head groom, Stevenson 

 (he was the beginning of me, was Stevenson ; he was 

 a nice man !), at Sir Horace's riding-school, and rode 

 the horses till the boys came out : then off I slips 

 home to dinner with my books, quite grave. Father 

 never knew of it, and the master he never told of me ; 

 not he. I loved nothing like horses. When I was only 

 six or seven, I used to go out on my pony, bare-back, 

 and jump everything right and left, just like other 



* Chapel-street, Melton. 



