256 Saddle and Sirloin . 



There is but doubtful news of Martyrdom, and Pero 

 Gomez is mentioned with as much respect as if he 

 were Mr. Peabody himself. The other spectators are 

 few. The three " Jacks," Robson, Holmes, Charlton, 

 whom we have seen on this spot so often, are all in 

 their graves, and now that he has no Blair Athol in 

 hand, Mr. I'Anson does not even spare an hour from 

 his farming. It hardly seems like the Saturday before 

 the St. Leger. Yorkshire is busy among her partridges 

 and her sheaves, and cannot compass the idea that 

 even John Scott, great as his triumphs have been, can 

 descend on the cracks, and wrest his seventeenth St. 

 Leger from them with a dark and an untried horse. 

 As a general thing, they have more belief round 

 Malton in George Osbaldeston, but still there are 

 plenty to shake their heads, and ask if the Belshazzar 

 and Barbatus blood is the thing to bring a horse home 

 in a St. Leger. 



" George " has a small party of his own to look on, 

 and three " literary touts," two of them regularly 

 attached to the London sporting papers, note him 

 and the rest of the lots as they do their work. Re- 

 ports from training quarters have now become a sort 

 of necessity, and as long as these writers keep their 

 distance, and do not tamper with the boys, trainers 

 and owners do not resent their presence. In fact, 

 many of them rather like the reports, as they can 

 hear what horses are doing elsewhere, and thus know 

 better what they are likely to meet. There was a 

 time, "long, long ago," when there were only two 

 touts at Newmarket — the portly York, who could 

 pull down eighteen stone on the scales, and a little 

 ex-jockey called Garratt. The latter wore a smock 

 when he was professionally engaged — that is to say, 

 when he " roamed through the dew ;" and when Lord 

 Foley once dropped across him before a trial, lying 

 as snug as a hare behind a roller on the Heath, 

 and asked him who he was, he promptly replied, that 



