i8o HUNTING. 



action. Indeed at Tattersall's it is mainly a question of money. 

 The man, who does not mind opening his purse wide, will 

 rarely fail to find himself suited, but he must open it, and wider 

 too, it seems, every day. We are supposing, of course, that he 

 intends buying only such horses as come to the hammer with 

 an established and trustworthy reputation : if he buys merely 

 because he likes the look of an animal, without knowing more 

 about it than the person in charge or some other equally inte- 

 rested and communicative individual may choose to tell him, 

 heaven help him we cannot. In every hunt there are always 

 a certain number of good nags whose merits are well known, and 

 whose price can be fairly calculated. There is no better chance, 

 for a man who need not trouble himself over-much about prices, 

 for picking up a good hunter than this, nor does it at all follow 

 that he will do better to buy privately than to wait and take his 

 chance in the auction yard. When the stud is the property of 

 some famous ' performer ' in the grass countries, of course the 

 competition will be brisk and the prices high. When the late 

 Lord Stamford gave up the Quorn hounds in 1863, an d sent his 

 stud to the hammer, the seventy-three horses realised nearly 

 fourteen thousand guineas, an average of about two hundred 

 pounds apiece, probably the highest ever known for so large a 

 stud. In 1826 Mr. George Payne had reached an even higher 

 average, but with a smaller stud ; his twenty-seven hunters and 

 hacks realising a sum of seven thousand five hundred guineas. 



In the autumn of 1884 the stud of a young officer, who 

 had had to give up hunting foxes in Leicestershire for hunting 

 Arabs in the Soudan, was sold at Tattersall's at an average of 

 two hundred and fifty pounds apiece. The pick of the famous 

 Lord Wilton's stable brought as much as six hundred pounds ! 



It is probable, however, that first-rate hunters may be 

 bought now for rather more rational prices than our grand- 

 fathers used to give. In the palmy days of the Old Club at 

 Melton, the buying and selling of horses was quite a feature 

 of the evening's amusement. 'Parties were often made on 

 purpose,' says ' The Druid,' ' and after a couple of bottles of 



