204 Silk and Scarlet. 



a proof of this, he ran a four-mile trial with Hap- 

 hazard at Lewes, even weights, at four o'clock in the 

 morning, and gave him such a tying up at the end of 

 three miles that Sam Chifney did not persevere, and 

 reported so decidedly as to his horse's loss of form, 

 that he started in public no more. The King's Plate 

 was run that afternoon, and William Edwards again 

 handed his horse home first after a most punishing 

 race with Walton. 



He was a very difficult horse to ride, and so inani- 

 mate and dead-skinned that nothing but a whip that 

 would curl well round him could make any impression 

 whatever. His stock were generally large, plain, and 

 brown, and many of them had rather cart-horse heads. 

 There was a great deal of the coach-horse about him, 

 and he stood very much over with one knee, and his 

 son Don Juan, who was put to Cleveland mares near 

 Catterick Bridge, got some of the best coaching stock 

 that ever went to a Yorkshire fair. From a cross 

 between him and a Highflyer mare, which made three 

 close stains of Herod in succession, came Scud, the 

 handsome sire of a handsome race ; but this too close 

 breeding may have borne fruits in Acta^on, whose 

 head and neck were most brilliant, and whose stock 

 mostly cut up soft. Through his other son Muley, of 

 Underley renown, Orvile at one time bid fair to be 

 very famous ; but while Alice Hawthorn and Wasp 

 have bred pretty well, Galaor seems the stopping 

 point in the branch of it which was represented by 

 the great leggy Muley Moloch ; while Moresco's 

 descends through Taurus and John o'Gaunt to the 

 lengthy handsome Hungerford. Taurus was a rank 

 roarer, but he could almost fly over the T.Y.C., and it 

 was all that Camarine (who liked any distance from the 

 T.Y.C., where even Crutch was no use to her, up to six 

 miles) could do to put him in difficulties by the time 

 they had travelled over two miles of the Beacon, in 

 the race which was a finisher for both of them. 



