THE CRITICS OF 185 



and wild moorland were more to his taste than the 

 office of Mr. Baxter, attorney, or even the editorial 

 sanctum. Through his friend, James White, alias 

 " Martingale," he soon made the acquaintance of every 

 sporting character in the neighbourhood, and his 

 natural appetite for conversing with all sorts and 

 conditions of men, and of being equally at home with 

 the peer and the peasant, found ample scope for 

 indulgence. He was as much in his element pumping 

 some decrepit herdsman in a remote ingle-nook or 

 chimney-corner, as he was, in spite of hi? shyness, in 

 the mansions of the nobility. Perhaps his greatest 

 talent was his capacity for getting humble and un- 

 lettered men to bestow their confidence upon him 

 This was exemplified in the confidence which Dick 

 Christian bestowed upon him. It was at Doncaster 

 also that he first showed his proficiency in horse-lore, 

 and we can imagine him and "Martingale" on the 

 Town Moor. When he had once seen a horse, he 

 seldom forgot him, a talent which was of great assis- 

 tance to him in after life, when he earned his bread, 

 inter alia, by paddock reporting, and won the name of 

 " The Old Mortality of the Turf." Not that his atten- 

 tion was confined to racehorses. Indeed, his predilec- 

 tion was for hunters and hacks, of which subsequently 

 his brother-in-law, Mr. George B. Lynes, was a suc- 

 cessful breeder, close to Althorp Park, in Northampton- 

 shire. Mr. Lynes attributed no small portion of the 

 success which attended his breeding efforts to the 

 advice given him by "The Druid." He advised Mr. 

 Lynes to put his first mare to King of Oude, the result 



