364 ASHGILL; OR, THE LIFE 



land Plate was meritorious enough to be followed by 

 a Cesarewitch, more especially after her somewhat 

 indifferent display in the Doncaster Cup, when she 

 finished third to that wonderful little horse, The Bard, 

 who beat St. Michael four lengths, the Ashgill mare's 

 third being a bad one. 



On the Thursday of the Cesarewitch week St. 

 Gatien, the dead-heater in the Derby with Harvester 

 two years before, beat Stone Clink in a canter for Her 

 Majesty's Plate, and thus rehabilitated his character 

 as a horse of class. It was a great humiliation to 

 Newmarket to find Stone Clink upsetting all their 

 calculations in the Cesarewiteh. Poor Harry Luke, 

 who, after riding Selby second to Stone Clink in the 

 Northumberland Plate, was expatriated to America on 

 the douceur of a thousand a year, was accused by many 

 of throwing the race away on the Malton horse; but 

 the Cesarewitch success of the mare demonstrated that 

 she was a sterling good animal that day, and, further- 

 more, as clearly proved that Luke rode a good race on 

 Selby. When St. Gatien and Stone Clink met in Her 

 Majesty's Plate they were running at even weights over 

 2 miles 105 yards. Until a furlong from home Stone 

 Clink had won that race, and it was only in the last 

 hundred yards that St. Gatien, one of the best horses 

 of his tune, got the upper hand of Speculum's daughter. 

 Some critics went so far as to cast reflections upon Mr. 

 Vyner running his mare, alleging that he acted some- 

 what indiscreetly in asking her to run a Queen's Plate 

 at even weights against a horse of St. Gatien's class 

 after the pounding she got in her severe struggle in the 

 Cesarewitch. Mr. Vyner has long been a bright and 

 shining light of the Turf, and though he for a period 

 had horses at Newmarket under the care of the late 



