Newmarket in the Oldeti Time. 85 



bad between wickets, that his scorer had generally a 

 sinecure. The very different temperaments which 

 even cricket practice elicited, had full scope under the 

 rigid but ever affectionate tuition of their father ; and 

 while he carefully grounded Will in the rudiments of 

 that training lore of which Priam and Zinganee were 

 destined to be such enduring monuments, he gave 

 Sam lesson after lesson in race-riding, from the moment 

 he dared trust him on a pony alone. To leave the 

 whip and bit, which he had handled so long and so 

 worthily, in the hands of another S. CHIFNEY of his 

 own teaching, was the great wish of his heart. Hence, 

 as if with a melancholy foreboding that his child 

 would soon be called to take his own place on the 

 Prince's horses, he used to slip off with him into the 

 stables when he was barely three stone, and after 

 putting a racing saddle on to Kit Karr, Silver, Sober 

 Robin, or Magic, show him by the hour how to sit and 

 hold his reins. Aided by lessons of this nature, and 

 constant practice twice a day in the gallops, Will had 

 already become a very expert horseman ; and while 

 he was with the string at exercise, his father and Sam, 

 one on his Heath hack, and the other on a pony, 

 would mark out a 300 yards' course under the cover of 

 the fir clump on the Warren Hill, and run twelve or 

 thirteen races in an afternoon. Every phase of finish- 

 ing was compressed into the lesson. Sam would make 

 the running ; and then his father would get to his 

 girths, take a pull, and initiate him into the mysteries 

 of a set-to. These tactics would then be reversed, and 

 Sam taught to get up and win by a head in the last 

 stride, or to nurse his pony and come with a tremen- 

 dous rush. The rush did not, however, supersede the 

 favourite slack-rein system, at which both the boys 

 practised with the most intense perseverance. Sam 

 almost lived on his pony; and poor Dennis Fitz- 

 patrick, who died in his forty-second year, from a cold 

 caught in wasting, only six months before Chifney 



