188 CONFESSIONS OF A HORSE DEALER. 



steady snaffle-bridle horse, will find they are tailed-off 

 and "shut up." Indeed many of them are never seen 

 after the meet ; for, if their butterfly riders could sit 

 em straight after the tail of the hounds, the fretting, 

 prancing interval between the " meet" and the " find" 

 has taken the little "go" out of them they ever pos- 

 sessed. Few horses, however, are fidgetty in their 

 natures ; but there is a class of riders who, when they 

 sit a horse that does not know how to "buck-jump" or 

 rear, are constantly harassing him with hand or leg, 

 merely for the sake of being noticed themselves. 



I know many who dress in the brightest of scarlet, 

 and best of buckskin smalls, who never saw a fox killed 

 by hounds in their lives. 



There are hundreds of clever hunters completely 

 spoiled by bad riders, who have neither hands to handle 

 them nor seats to sit on them ; and, although I am well 

 aware that numbers of horses are sold as hunters, which 

 possess not a single point requisite for a hunter even of 

 the second class, yet I also know that there are gentle- 

 men who profess to be hunting men, who buy and pay a 

 good price to respectable horse-dealers for the best of 

 horses, but who in a few weeks will completely spoil 

 any horse in the world, both in temper and condition 

 solely because their grooms neglect them in the stables, 

 and they themselves are deficient in the requisite nerve 

 and skill to ride them in the field, and such gentlemen 

 as these never have a horse to suit them ; they are con- 

 tinually sending them back to their dealers and chang- 



