REMINISCENCES OF SONEPORE. 



therefore, it would in 1881 and the preceding year have been 

 well worth the while of the Sonepore Stewards, when they 

 had men like the Princes of Jodhpore, Dacca and Cooch Behar, 

 as well as the [best European sportsmen England or India 

 could boast of, willing to come to their meeting, to have 

 parcelled them out among the local native Princes' and 

 Stewards' camps, and have made much of them. It was more 

 this blindness to good management, than all the tall talk 

 about family party business, that confined Behar racing from 

 this epoch, to mere local competition. There was very little 

 to choose between the rival local stables, each, to a certain 

 extent, was jealous of the others, yet no truer friends ever 

 existed than the three Europeans who virtually ruled Behar 

 racing during the eighties. The papers were beginning to slang 

 Sonepore, when Judex Simpson, who, still though an absentee, 

 loved Sonepore as did, and do, all its devotees, wrote thus to 

 the Asian in March 1881 : 



" In the present instance the past can compare favorably 

 with the present, as can be seen from the fact that then the 

 five days of racing were supplemented by an entirely extra 

 sixth day, on the Monday; and now people are quite satisfied with 

 four days. To me, who had sworn by Sonepore in the old days, 

 who had felt it to be unapproached and unapproachable by 

 anything in any way, it was sad to hear of this diminution of its 

 regular days from five to four, for I felt how the amount of in- 

 terest taken in it in former days would have made this im- 

 possible, vide the extra sixth day, which obtained in 1855, as 

 well as in 1856. Indeed so bound up were all frequenters of 

 the meeting with all connected with it, and such friends had it 

 made us, that I do not know what it might not have extended 

 to but for that terrible mutiny with its permanently deterio- 

 rating effect upon everything. How our racing has gone off, 

 in quality not in quantity, since then ; and how much have not 

 native non-official officers lost by the extinction of John Com- 



