94 THE ENGLISH TURF 



good judges would declare Seabreeze to have been the best 

 of her year ; but I have now gone through ten years, and 

 according to my judgment the claims of Galtee More, 

 Persimmon, Ladas, Isinglass, Common, and Donovan cannot 

 be disputed. Ayrshire has a rival in Seabreeze, Sir Hugo 

 was admittedly inferior to La Fleche, while a good case 

 can be made out against Sir Visto. Sainfoin on the other 

 hand has no claims to the title of best of his year, and 

 thus while six winners out of the ten will always hold 

 the title, two others (Ayrshire and Sir Visto) will always 

 dispute it merely, and only two are clean out of it. In 

 the case of Sir Hugo, it will be said that he was the second 

 best colt of his year, though not the equal of La Fleche. 

 Jeddah, the winner in 1898, was a very moderate horse in 

 a very moderate year, but amongst Derby winners Flying 

 Fox, the hero of 1899, will always take very high rank, 

 indeed by some critics he has been spoken of as one of 

 the horses of the century. That he has claims to such a 

 position will hardly be denied, and though he failed twice 

 when a two-year-old, he passed from one triumph to another 

 a year later, and in my time I can recollect no other race- 

 horse who put on such a wonderful sequence of victories 

 with so little trouble to himself. He won all his three- 

 year-old engagements in a canter, and at the end of the 

 season he stood out about a stone and a half in front of 

 the next best of his age. In the spring of his four-year- 

 old career he was sold to a French owner, M. Blanc, and 

 was at once sent to the stud. Thus we have had no 

 opportunity of judging what kind of a four-year-old he 

 would have made, but he was as sound as a bell when 

 taken out of training, and on the day he was sold his 

 muscular development was simply extraordinary, a some- 

 what singular circumstance, because the great Kingsclere 

 sale was held in March, just at the end of the average 

 racehorse's easy time, and before anything like strong work 

 had been begun. 



Flying Fox was bred at the Eaton Stud by the late Duke 

 of Westminster, and is a son of Orme out of Vampire 

 by Galopin, her dam Irony by Rosebery out of Sarcasm 



