^6 Saddle and Sir loin. 



Longtown is also a great affair with Mr. Tom Gibbons 

 as perpetual president. Mr. Wightman, the senior 

 field steward, is a notable character on his half-Arab 

 mare, " Fanny," and the way in which he drives a 

 hare up a long fallow field, nearly half-a-mile in 

 length, sometimes right in the face of a crowd, is a 

 treat to see. Although he has been born and bred a 

 foxhunter, being brother-in-law to Willy Routledge of 

 The Crook (who has owned a small pack of fox- 

 hounds for half a century), and does not care much 

 for coursing, still he lends all the help he can, and 

 is most capitally seconded by Mr. James Little of 

 Guards. 



Mr. Nightingale considered the Altcar ground to 

 be in most respects superior to all other ground, 

 barring the best parts of Amesbury and Ashdown. 

 The only drawbacks are the smeuzes for hares to run 

 into and the open ditch system. Nothing spoils a 

 dog so much as to lose sight of his game just as he 

 is going to strike it. The ditches have changed the 

 fortune of many a course ; but they are wanted to 

 take off the waters from the levels into the larger 

 cuts, and from thence to the engine-house, where it 

 is pumped into the river at a higher level. The 

 great main cut to the engine-house has never been 

 jumped by pedestrians without a leaping-pole ; but 

 Mr. Nightingale once threw his whip over and did it 

 in his riding-dress, with a pair of light buckskins and 

 long knee-boots, without a nail in the sole. After a 

 heavy fall of rain, such is the variable nature of the 

 Altcar ground, that some parts are very spongy, and 

 others firm and hard. Still, all styles of greyhounds 

 can run over it, if they only understand how to fly a 

 drain, from Judge at 67IDS. to Lobelia at 43lbs. Be- 

 sides the Waterloo Meeting, the Altcar Club generally 

 meets there twice in the course of the season ; and 

 Lord Sefton is as true a patron of the leash in the 

 North, as Lord Craven and Sir Edmund Antrobus in 



