286 The Post and the Paddock. 



could go on for ever. Three hundred guineas was the 

 highest figure he ever reached, and that sum, or 250/., 

 was given twice or three times over for him, by Lords 

 Suffield, Uxbridge, and Messrs. Elmore and Anderson. 

 Of all " mud-larkers," the Uxbridge-born British 

 Yeoman was the premier. He was " light everywhere, 

 all wire in fact, and with far more of the cut of a 

 carriage-horse than a hunter ;" but although wonder- 

 fully steady, he was rather too slow at his jumps for 

 the present light-weight steeple-racing. He was by 

 Count Porro out of Pintail, who bred such bad 

 animals, weak hocked, and not able to go a yard in 

 dirt, for several seasons, that " Nimrod" advised her 

 owner to save himself an income by cutting her throat. 

 Alas for advice gratis! she lived to produce British 

 Yeoman."^ 



Peter Simple's steeple-chase prowess is still fondly 

 remembered in Lincolnshire, and we have often been 

 amused with the habit which prevails there, of com- 

 paring the points of every grey hunter, by *' Old 

 Peter," as he is familiarly termed. He was a grey 

 light-fleshed varmint-looking horse, not very big, but 

 all muscle and wire ; and, be the fence what it might, 

 he would, like his more modern namesake from the 

 Holderness country, have it some way or other, and 

 without a mistake. Such light perfect action as his 

 has been rarely seen, and this knack of moving was 

 peculiar to all the stock of Arbutus. It was in a run 

 from Bradley Wood to Irby Holmes, during a very 

 foggy morning, that a few of the leaders first began to 

 suspect that something extraordinary in the horse- 

 flesh way was coming out, as they never could get rid 

 of the grey spectre. Gaylad, a lengthy coaching-sort 

 of horse by Brutandorf, was another of the Lincoln- 

 shire steeple-chase cracks, but he was unable to get 

 through dirt like Peter Simple ; still, what he lost by 



* sporting Review, February, 1850. 



