448 



ASHGILL; OR, THE LIFE 



his style. The strong seat and resolute courage of 

 Custance were seen to great advantage when he rode 

 the insubordinate Broomielaw for the Chesterfield Cup 

 of Goodwood, and, speaking summarily, the racing men 

 of to-day (1886) may boast that half a dozen living 

 jockeys are equal — ^we do not think them superior — 

 to the " brilliant quartette " selected by " The Druid " in 

 the last generation as primi inter pares. 



There is a sort of a parallel between John Osborne 

 and old John Day, who was one of the most remarkable 

 men of his profession in this nineteenth century. Both 

 sons of trainers, they became as conspicuous for their 

 integrity as for their habits of temperance and their 

 traits of modesty. John Day's father, like old John 

 Osborne, was a self-made man, and what the one was 

 to the South the other was to the North — masters of 

 the mysteries of horse flesh ; and the parallel still goes 

 further, for the facts of the early Hfe of these now- 

 departed worthies of the Turf— John Day died in 1860, 

 and old John Osborne in 1865 — are scanty in the 

 extreme. Both were believers in the value of the old 

 saw: — 



" Early to bed, and early to rise. 

 Makes a mau healthy, wealthy, and wise." 



Disciplinarians even almost to a severe degree, the 

 family characteristics were inherited in both instances 

 by their offspring. Young John Osborne's first worldly 

 recollection is riding on his father's grey horse to 

 Burton-on-Trent races in 1836, then being an infant 

 three years old. When no taller than a bucket, John 

 Day was transferred from the nurser}^ to the stable, 

 and thus with the seed early sown, " the child became 

 father to the man," as the records of the Turf were 

 destined to show. It is said of the master of Danebury 



