256 Silk and Scarlet. 



although it was a very fast thing of four miles, without 

 a check, from Reeves Gorse to Fringford Hill, Stephen 

 was just coming into the field on his white Trinket as 

 Ben swung them round. This horse, and the chestnut 

 Ragman were prime favourites, but neither of them 

 carried him like King Charles. Sir Thomas bought 

 his horse from Charles Warde, who found him quite a 

 jade when he squeezed him at the end of the first 

 quarter of an hour ; whereas Stephen, by holding him 

 together, and never asking him to go beyond a certain 

 pace, could get along with him over the best country. 

 He was a fine goer, but did not look up to a great 

 weight. Nothing could induce his rider to go to scale; 

 but Mr. Harrison (who made up, with Sir Thomas, 

 Lord Jersey, and Sir Henry Peyton, the hard-riding 

 corps of the hunt) lured him by stratagem on to a 

 patent weighing-chair, and saw with his own eyes the 

 pointer standing at nineteen-four. Stephen found out 

 that he had been done ; and as Ragman sent him over 

 his head into a pond that afternoon, when they were 

 going to an outlying fixture, and the bacon dripped on 

 to his head with the heat of the public-house fire, which 

 was lighted to rough-dry him, he retired prematurely 

 to rest, growling that he had never gone through such 

 a day in his life. He rode two holes shorter on the 

 right side, and was niggling so perpetually at his horses 

 with his short-necked spurs, that the grey contracted 

 quite an enormous white mark, and the chestnut a 

 black one to match. 



Leviathan as he was, his knowledge of hounds and 

 hunting was quite in accordance with his weight. 

 The price of draft hounds has seldom been known to 

 be so high as when Charles X. bought 150 of the 

 biggest hounds he could in 1824-26 ; but such was 

 Stephen's fame as a breeder and breaker, that he could 

 always command as much as fifteen guineas a couple for 

 his in the home market. He loved to stoop them to hare 

 with the couples on, but never ran them in view, and 



