The Sport of Our (Ancestors 



sendine, only then subsiding after a three days' flood. ^ * Who 

 is that under his horse in the brook ? ' inquires that good 

 sportsman and fine rider, Mr. Green, of Rolleston, whose 

 noted old mare had just skimmed over the water like a 

 swallow on a summer's evening. * It 's Middleton Biddulph,' 

 says one. ' Pardon me,' cries Mr. Middleton Biddulph ; 



* Middleton Biddulph is here, and here he means to he ! ' 



* Only Dick Christian,'^ answers Lord Forester, * and it's 

 nothing new to him.' ' But he '11 be drowned,' exclaims Lord 

 Kinnaird. ' I shouldn't wonder,' observes Mr. William 

 Coke. But the pace is too good to inquire. 



The fox does his best to escape : he threads hedge-rows, 

 tries the out-buildings of a farm-house, and once turns so 

 short as nearly to run his foil, but — the perfection of the 

 thing — the hounds turn shorter than he does, as much as 

 to say — die you shall. The pace has been awful for the last 

 twenty minutes. Three horses are blown to a standstill, 

 and few are going at their ease. * Out upon this great car- 

 case of mine ! no horse that was ever foaled can live under 

 it at this pace, and over this country,' says one of the best 

 welter-weights, as he stands over his four-hundred-guinea 

 chestnut, then rising from the ground after giving him a 

 heavy fall, his tail nearly erect in the air, his nostrils violently 

 distended, and his eye almost fixed.^ 



1 A true story. 



2 A celebrated rough-rider at Melton Mowbray, who greatly distinguished 

 himself in the late grand steeplechase from Rolleston. He is paid fifteen 

 shillings per day for riding gentlemen's young horses with hounds. 



3 The writer here alluded to that celebrated sportsman, as well as horse- 



174 



