52 THE SPORT OF KINGS 



who want horses to work, and come out regularly, 

 taking the rough with the smooth, I naturally did 

 not class them as hunters. 



It does not require any special knowledge to 

 be able to teach " Glendale " something about 

 those Irish horses which have averaged ^80 to 

 ^100 at auction sales. I do know how many 

 of the horses that have been sold at the various 

 Repositories have finished, and that, I take it, 

 is the criterion of a hunter's capabilities, and not 

 the price he brings. But " Glendale " assumes 

 otherwise, and he must be right. 



Of the Irish horses that have been sold at one 

 Repository during the last few years, I can safely 

 say that there have not been half a score that have 

 given satisfaction to their purchasers. Many of 

 them were decidedly of the harness type, and made 

 good match horses, and for this purpose many 

 were bought. In one case, where some useful and 

 well-bred horses were bought at a long price, the 

 purchaser got scarcely any hunting out of them the 

 first season, and none at all before Christmas, for they 

 went to pieces directly they were put into work, 

 and I could multiply such instances almost inde- 

 finitely. My own experience of buying hunters — 

 i.e. made horses from farmers — is, as I have 

 already said, rather a painful one. Two out of the 

 three were bottled-up horses. One of them I rode 

 two or three times, the other I hacked once. The 

 third horse was as good a bit of horseflesh as a 

 man need wish to have, and he had not gone to 

 the dealer's because he was not fashionable enough 

 in appearance. But unfortunately he had been 

 messed about by the farmer's men, and when he 

 got into a crowd he was rather rash. His rashness 



