RETROSPECT 351 



money-making business, yet the fact remains that I found 

 myself able to do so when all other means failed. 



Nothing can give back the many years of fighting against 

 fate when hunting, shooting and all other sports except 

 racing were cut out. To those I can never come back 

 at least it is very rare to find anyone able to do so after 

 such an interval. Shooting, in particular, is not what it 

 was in my young days. You then shot partridges going 

 away from you, whereas now they come at you, and 

 desperately fast too. Still one can manage to enjoy life, 

 even when playing a singularly indifferent game of golf, 

 and the pleasures attendant on horse-breeding and racing 

 are perennial. I hope still to see another race-meeting at 

 Thirsk, and, of course, at York and Doncaster ; nor have 

 I failed to retain the old Blink Bonny line of blood, from 

 which one may still hope to breed a Bayardo, a Lemberg 

 or a My Dear. Two young mares of this family are now 

 at Cobham, one called Mary Queen of Scots and the other 

 Orange Mary. 



If it be necessary to refer to characters mentioned 

 earlier in this book, I may repeat that Tom Palliser died 

 at the age of ninety and Mr Kingsley at one hundred and 

 one. Mr Arrowsmith has been dead some forty years. 

 He was a good old soul and I liked him well, but he was 

 quite unfit to be guardian of myself or anyone else. 



The Kilvington property remained nominally mine 

 through all the vicissitudes, but it was charged in a manner 

 that left it a damnosa hereditas as far as I was concerned, 

 and its only value to me was that it gave me two county 

 votes, one for Thirsk Division and one for Northallerton. 

 I have never failed to go and vote for the Unionist 

 candidates, but after the New Reform Act plural voting 

 is at an end, so I let the property be sold in the summer 

 of 1918. That ended the sole remaining connection with 

 the old place and I hope it may benefit its various new 

 owners. 



The kennels, by the way, had been turned to poultry 

 houses when I saw them last and it did not look as though 



