352 A MIRROR OF THE TURF. 



was mixed a little brandy. A Yorkshire jockey, 

 called Jacques — it is not on record whether or not 

 he was, like Shakespeare's hero, a melancholy 

 man — once reduced his weight no less than seven- 

 teen pounds in twenty-four hours. Three times 

 within that period he walked from the grand 

 stand at Newcastle to Gosforth Hall, a distance 

 of three miles, making a tour of eighteen miles in 

 all. Jacques was a famous and artful waster. His 

 diet on the occasion under notice was a little tea 

 with gin mixed in it, which caused him to perspire 

 freely ; a dry biscuit and a poached ^gg served in 

 vinegar was all the food he took in twenty-four 

 hours. Sam Darling, another olden-time jockey, 

 walked on an average about five hundred miles a 

 year in order to keep himself down to racing 

 weight. Some jockeys used long ago to waste 

 by means of hard riding, clad, of course, in heavy 

 woollen garments ; others preferred to do their 

 penance in their walks from course to course, thus 

 killing the proverbial two birds with one stone. 

 John Osborne once relieved himself of seven 

 pounds of superfluous flesh in one of these walks. 

 Other horsemen have done the same. Many of 

 the jockeys of sixty years ago were as good 

 pedestrians as equestrians. 



"Nimrod" tells us that the old system of 

 wasting was as follows : " With jockeys in high 

 repute it lasted from about three weeks before 

 Easter to the end of October, but a week or ten 

 days are quite sufficient for a rider to reduce 

 himself from his natural weight to sometimes a 

 stone and a half below it. For breakfast they 

 take a small piece of bread and butter with tea in 

 moderation ; dinner is taken very sparingly — a 



