THE BLACKSMITH 185 



occurrence is a rare one, still we think that question might 

 just as reasonably be asked as half the questions that are put 

 about hunters. 



Speaking of this horse, leads us to observe how beautifully 

 Providence turns even the infirmities of His creatures to good 

 account. To look at this animal no sportsman could doubt 

 the appropriateness of its form for hunting purposes. It was 

 the hunter all over, with one of the lightest, best set on heads 

 we ever saw. Added to a commanding figure, it had the 

 finest freest action imaginable, and though the circumstance 

 of such a horse coming to the hammer single-handed as it 

 were — that is to say not in a stud — certainly was suspicious, 

 still there were alwaj's fine venturesome men in the yard 

 ready to speculate on such a piece of perfection, and it was 

 sold in different parts of London— at Tattersall's, Aldridge's 

 the Horse Bazaar, and Barbican a dozen times at least before 

 it was regularly blown. We recognized it in five hunts one 

 season — the Royal buckhounds, Mr. de Burgh's staghounds, 

 the Hatfield, the Surrey, the old Berkeley, and more than 

 once saw its sleight-of-hand trick of chucking a fore-shoe 

 half-way up in the owner's face, before we suspected what 

 screw was loose. On each change of hunt we need hardly 

 say it was in the hands of a different owner, and as luck 

 would have it, about the twelfth time of " asking," our 

 friend Blatherington Brown, the Manchester warehouseman of 

 Friday-street, who thinks he knows more about horses than 

 muslins, had strayed into Tat's with a nice clean fifty pound 

 note in his blue satin note-case, and seeing this superb animal 

 trotting to and fro, and Tat labouring up the ladder of 

 bidders — a very unusual thing for Tat to do, by the way — 

 Brown thought it wasn't possible he could take any harm even 

 if he got the horse, and if he didn't, why giving a " bid " was 

 a cheap piece of flash that would tell in the City. Shock Jem, 

 the enterprising Mr. Pywell, and other cheap Johns of the 



