312 The Post and the Paddock. 



From Gloucestershire we must now cross the 

 country to Staffordshire, where Old King Cole begot 

 a generation of fifteen and a half black-legged bays, 

 rare jumpers, but with high tempers and heavy fore- 

 hands, and not fit for hunting work much before they 

 were six. Accident, who was by Camel out of Miss 

 Breeze by Phantom, had no great chance, as cart mares 

 and common stock principally attended his levees ; 

 still, as a general thing, the produce were big good 

 class bays and browns, with abundance of symmetry 

 and bone, which showed that the old Phantom blood 

 would tell. Parson Harvey used always to swear by 

 Phantom as a hunter sire, and he was very anxious 

 that Will Butler in his younger days should take the 

 horse off his hands, and keep a farm. The parson at 

 a meet was " a caution to see." His hunters were 

 always in the straw-yard, and the sire, Vandyke, did 

 all manner of work. In fact, it was "a season" of 

 some sort or other with him the whole year round. 

 He would send him on to the meet in a curb bridle 

 and an old cloth for a sheet, and then follow with his 

 saddle in his Scotch cart, tilt it up in some field, 

 leaving the cart horse and the groom to graze and 

 ruminate together till he returned. At the meet, too, 

 he was never quiet for an instant, as he always kept 

 his horse stepping round and round in a ring, and pour- 

 ing forth meanwhile a perfect torrent of conversation 

 over his shoulder. But that dark thin ex-divine must 

 not make us linger or forget Cheshire and its horses, 

 amongst whom, Speculator with his stock, small but 

 stout as steel, Sir Oliver with his slashing and rather 

 leggy browns, and Cheshire Cheese with his thick and 

 stout descendants, take brevet rank. Astbury, who 

 ran that unparalleled trio of four-mile dead heats over 

 the Newcastle-under-Lyme racecourse, was, to use 

 the phrase of his district, " a lost horse," as so few 

 good mares came to his paddocks, but still he left 

 several stout rather leggy and wonderfully game 



