THE HORSE MAKER. 169 
and qualities to which they have perhaps been strangers all 
their lives. 
The horse maker has an intimate connection with the 
knackers 5 yards, to the proprietors of which he is well known 
as a customer. Not a few of his bargains in horseflesh have 
been previously doomed to the dogs, (or rather, in London, to 
the cats,) and have been temporarily rescued by him from the 
knacker’s knife. So well is this known, that respectable 
dealers in the metropolis, on sending a horse to be slaugh- 
tered, invariably charge their servants to see the animal slain 
before quitting the premises of the knacker. If this precau- 
tionary measure be omitted, it is more than possible that the 
owner of the beast may find himself, a few days after, mounted 
on the very brute which he had condemned to the knife, 
having bought him, re-manufactured, to supply the place of 
the supposed dead one. An instance actually occurred no 
great while ago of a farmer selling an old roadster for dog’s- 
meat price at Barnet fair, and buying him again two days after 
at Smithfield, riding home well pleased with his purchase, and 
only discovering the fraud through the unaccountable fami- 
liarity of what he supposed to be the stranger horse with his 
old quarters. 
A favourite speculation of these worthies, and one that 
generally pays a swinging per centage, is by clubbing together 
to purchase at a country fair a lot of wild colts fresh from the 
hills, and, by dint of doctoring and dressing, to prepare them 
for exhibition and sale at the west-end auction-marts. We 
have more than once witnessed the sale of these job-lots, 
which very rarely result to the satisfaction of the purchasers. 
We have seen each separate nag, just two minutes before he 
was led out to exhibit his paces in view of the company, sub- 
jected to certain indescribable manipulations and applications 
of stimulating nostrums, intended and calculated to make him 
counterfeit the gait and action of thorough-breeding, or some- 
thing like it ; and many a hack, whose actual value must have 
been something between seven and ten pounds, have we seen 
knocked down for from twenty to thirty guineas, or even 
more, to heedless amateurs in horse-flesh, who, before a week 
was over, would have been too glad to part with their bar- 
gains at a loss of fifty per cent. Still it is possible at times 
to get a bargain even from a horse maker. From the intimate 
practical knowledge these fellows acquire of all the various 
diseases and vicious propensities of the race equine , it does 
occasionally happen, especially when the defect is a vice and 
not a disease, that they will effect a thorough cure. We were 
once too well acquainted with a brute who possessed every 
