MY START AS A TRAINER 87 



is a nice sort of horse to put me on. He will 

 break my neck. I thought every moment he 

 was going to fall down.'* 



Presently, up came Sir Joseph to see his 

 two-year-olds at work. I told him we had just 

 given Satyr a canter. " Do you think/' he asked, 

 ** it will do him any harm if he runs for the Hunt 

 Cup to-morrow ? " I replied that it was practi- 

 cally a certainty he would break down, but as he 

 was virtually a broken-down horse already, we 

 might as well let him take his chance. " No 

 doubt," I added, ** the race will bring his racing 

 career to an end, for it will be idle to attempt to 

 patch him up again.'* " Then we will start him," 

 said Sir Joseph. Start him we did, and to our 

 utter astonishment, he won pretty easily. Sir 

 Joseph had not been able to lay off any of his bets, 

 and so won ;^i 8,000. 



In view of the facts I have here set down, 

 it is rather amusing to read in a contemporary 

 publication that ** the Royal Hunt Cup was a 

 triumph of the British public over the judgment 

 of Sir Joseph Hawley, Sir Frederick Johnstone, 

 and Mr. Gerard Sturt — a nice * job lot * to 

 take against the field — for the former body 

 would stick to Satyr against Eastley, who was 

 tried to be nearly, if not quite, a stone better 

 than Freemason (a winner at Chester that year), 

 and who, if ridden by Butler with a whip, would 

 doubtless have landed the good thing cleverly." 



