REMINISCENCES OF SONEPORE. 137 



getting more popular, Sonepore was steadily going down hill, 

 and the reason therefor was not difficult to gauge. Dear old 

 Bicrom with the very best of intentions, knew not a race horse 

 from a donkey, and year by year he seemed to get more and 

 more blind to the reasons for his meeting decreasing in popu- 

 larity among the general racing community. Let us take his 

 Stewards for 1881, and be it always remembered that when a 

 Secretary has been in harness as long as he had, he could, if 

 gifted with any powers of organisation, have gathered round 

 him sportsmen, instead of unsympathetic individuals who looked 

 on the racing portion of the show more as a nuisance than 

 aught else. Arthur Butler, who was the only one with any 

 knowledge of racing, headed the list. He was straight as a die 

 and a splendid judge of a horse, and as part owner in a racing 

 stable, his sound judgment and attention to details, made him 

 invaluable to an impulsive, generous, large-hearted, careless of 

 expenditure, thorough sportsman like Jimmy McLeod, who 

 would put up twenty friends every meeting, feed and train their 

 nags, enter them, pay their expenses going from meeting to 

 meeting, and then forget to send in a bill. Arthur Butler 

 looked on this part of the show as " Magnifiqxe, mats pas la 

 querre" he was perhaps a bit partial as a Steward. Then came 

 good old Tom Gibbon, whom Jimmy had coaxed a year or two 

 previously to come out of his shell and appear as an owner of 

 horses, but to expect poor, gentle, shy, retiring Tom to pose as 

 a racing oracle, was almost as hopeless as to try and teach a hip- 

 popotamus to rival the Tespsichorean revels of a ballet dancer. 

 Fred Halliday, best of good fellows and hosts, cared naught for 

 the green sward, though he would subscribe liberally to it; 

 Major Money, a good man in his place, but an absolute ignoramus 

 in racing matters ; Anthony Patrick MacDonell, whom planters 

 loved not, was shoved on as Steward chiefly to keep him as much 

 as possible out of mischief ; Paddy Hudson by this time cared 

 little for the game, while Mr. C, C. Quinn was a nonenity. 



