548 A HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH TURF. 



up the prevalent atmosphere of dejection or of confidence. The yearlings, too, 

 whose manners should be perfectly trained when they arrive from any decent stud, 

 will not learn vice from ill-treatment while they begin their first lessons in hard 

 work, and will not flinch when you go up to them in their stall any more than 

 they did when you patted them as foals in the paddock. The routine of training- 

 stables is not so unfamiliar to any reader of these pages that I need describe it 

 at length. Most trainers will tell you that when they make their first early round 

 at five or six, and earlier in summer, it is always the most promising who have 

 had a bad night, or suddenly revealed "something wrong" with a joint. But if 

 all goes well the "sheeted string" is off to the downs long before breakfast, while 

 the trainer and his head lad follow them and talk over the work that is to be done, 

 until the horses are warmed up with a little walking and cantering in preparation for 

 their harder work over distances, and at a pace, that have been carefully settled 

 beforehand. Kisber (for instance) was always lame in the stable, and was generally 

 walked about for two hours before commencing fast work. He would have won the 

 Leger, as he had the Derby and the Grand Prix, had he not broken down in the pan 

 of the heel some time before the race. His owner, who had hedged when this 

 happened, doubled his stake after Hayhoe had given the horse a couple of canters at 

 the last moment. 



Some of the two-year-olds are practised in starting, with the boys in silk jackets, 

 and the starting-gate apparatus, of which I shall have a word to say later on. But in 

 every case the greatest care is taken not to worry the horses in ways that can be 

 prevented, and not to make their racing preparations too distasteful to them, either 

 by trials that break their hearts before they see a racecourse, or by undue punish- 

 ment at the wrong time. The business of " trials " in the technical sense is not one 

 that can properly be treated here, but it has changed very much in the last fifty 

 years, with the changes that have been brought to life in general by the newspaper 

 press and advancing electrical facilities of every sort. I may say, however, that if it 

 is quite possible for a good jockey to give a trainer the most valuable information in 

 the world about a horse's pace after a good trial against carefully selected animals, it 

 is equally on the cards that careless or deliberately dishonest riding will produce 

 a result that may fatally mislead the most sharp-eyed and experienced trainer. The 

 tale of misleading " trials " is as old as Tregonwell Frampton. 



It will do the young ones no harm to let them nibble a little fresh dewy grass 

 on the downs and get quite calmed down after their gallop before they walk home 



