232 The Post and the Paddock. 



shiremen generally direct their attention to quick 

 returns, and try to breed great slapping carriage- 

 horses, to be sold at three years old for from 8o/. to 

 I2O/., in the Howden market ; and if they cannot get 

 them big enough, they cut their tails and call them 

 hunters. An allusion to the size of the head in the 

 latter case would.no doubt induce the venerable re- 

 tort, " What's the odds ? a horse don't go on his head /" 

 Shropshire, on the contrary, determines to have a 

 hunter, and nothing but a hunter, and has bred ac- 

 cordingly, since the days of the celebrated Old Tat, 

 who combined the Highflyer and Matchem strains, 

 and made the Shropshire-bred horses especially 

 famous, about the time that Mr. Meynell gave up 

 hounds. Rugely in June is a very great fair for 

 hunters, Welsh and Shropshire, as well as troopers, 

 but the prices are not up to Horncastle ; and Stour- 

 bridge had also an immense repute, until Shrewsbury, 

 which is fixed for two weeks earlier in March, dealt it 

 a heavy blow. Rugby's horse fair, in November, in- 

 cludes all kinds, from the 3OO-guinea hunter down to 

 the ten shillings' potter's steed, in which Rugbasans 

 were wont in old times to invest, for the glory of one 

 afternoon's ride between the callings over, on condi- 

 tion that their old owners took them back at half- 

 price if they lived, or gratis if they died. 



The Yarborough, South Wold, and Burton hunts 

 are the great public schools, where the heads, hands, 

 and heels of a legion of Hard-Riding Dicks are ever 

 at work for five months of the year, in transforming 

 the raw one-hundred-guinea Howdenite into the 

 finished two-hundred-guinea candidate for Horncastle. 

 It is, however, to the dealers in this as in every other 

 county that they have to look for purchasers, as hunt- 

 ing men will scarcely ever buy from farmers, however 

 well they may ride, and have to pay a handsome sum 

 extra for their whim. Horncastle fair has long been 

 the great Lincolnshire Carnival of horse-flesh, and far 



