3 i6 THE SPORT OF KINGS 



" I should not class him as a 1 5 stone horse," said 

 a friend to me once, as he mounted me on a long, 

 low, "old-fashioned" looking horse, 15.3, and a 

 well-bred one, " but he'll carry you, and I think 

 you'll say he is one of the best weight-carriers you 

 ever rode." And at the end of forty minutes I 

 did say so. Yet in the show ring the horse in 

 question would have been deemed hardly up to 

 13 stone. So, as Mr. Teasdale Hutchinson once 

 pertinently remarked, when asked his advice as 

 to how to breed hunters, " It all depends what you 

 want them to do. If you want them to keep 

 a good place when hounds run fast, you must 

 have them well bred. If you want a horse to ride 

 about the lanes, it does not matter so much." 



It is, I know, not a very easy matter to breed 

 weight-carrying hunters of high class, neither is it, 

 for the matter of that, a very easy matter to breed 

 Derby winners. But one thing is very certain, 

 and that is that unless a hunter has a lot of 

 thoroughbred blood he cannot live the pace at 

 which hounds run nowadays. So if it is difficult to 

 lay down a rule as to how to breed a hunter, it is 

 not so difficult to lay down a rule how not to 

 breed one. It may be laid down that a thorough- 

 bred sire is imperative. Of course, I know there 

 is a lot of talk about " making " a breed of hunters, 

 but I fail to see how success can attend efforts in 

 this direction. Wonderful and very plausible 

 accounts have been written to show how hunters 

 will improve in substance with the use of half- 

 bred sires, but so far as I can see, when for genera- 

 tions these so-called hunter sires have been bred, 

 we shall only have a similar class of horse to what 

 we have at present, without his hardihood and vigour. 



