OLD JOHN DAY. [)7 



knowledg-e of their business got them nominations in this 

 forced handicap, 



Let us see how far the Stud Book and Calendars 

 warranted the heavy responsibility with which the world 

 so long- saddled '^ Honest John." Without the one at 

 our elbow we should say he was at his decease, within 

 four or five years or so of the '^ age " of man ; or, in other 

 words, that he had seen somewhere about sixty-six sum- 

 mers. He was very well bred for his profession, as his 

 father was a country trainer of some repute ; but as 

 '^ Nimrod " wrote of him five-and-twenty years since, in 

 his famous Quarterly Review article, '^The endowments 

 of Nature are not alwaj^s hereditary, and well for our hero 

 that they are not, for he is the son of a man who weighed 

 twenty stone, whereas he himself can ride seven stone. '^ 

 The father lived at Houghton Down, where John was 

 born, and his mother, a Miss Barham, came of a ver}^ 

 good family at Stockbridge — as many would say, of a 

 much superior one to that of her husband. Hence the 

 son's second name, John Barham Dayj a title, though, 

 that he never took up in full until his son, again, " Young 

 John," had set up in business on his own account. It 

 would be idle, however, to attempt to identify John Day 

 as the son of his parents, or yet as their son the jockey. 

 Old Mrs. Day, his mother, and herself as good a judge of 

 what a horse could do as one-half the professors, was 

 fond of telHng the story of a race she once saw, in which 

 five of her own boys rode. These were — John Barham ; 

 the far more elegant and accomplished Sam ; Charles, 

 who subsequently went to Russia ; William ; and James, 

 a veterinary surgeon, at one time in practice near Exeter, 

 but latterly living with his nephew William, at Wood- 

 yates. We do not remember that the old lady ever 



