44 The Life of Fred Archer 
late Mr. Cregoe Colmore. The pony could jump stone walls 
almost as big as herself. After a good run Freddie was often 
in at the finish or thereabouts, and on more than one occasion 
he had the brush. It was, indeed, astonishing to see this 
weedy little boy on a pony leading the field far ahead of grown 
men on hundred-guinea hunters. 
" Thus," says a writer in Baily's Magazine, " in this 
eminently sporting corner of old England, the rendezvous of 
the Fitzhardinge and Cotswold Hounds, young Archer took his 
first breathings and exercise in the saddle, and at a very youth- 
ful age was able to follow a pack of hounds over a country 
where stone walls are not infrequently the obstacles to be sur- 
mounted and the stiff red clay of the district often makes deep 
and heavy going in the arable. . . . Archer learned to sit a 
horse so well that when in the saddle he seemed to be part of 
the animal, or, as Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes has it, to be 
merely an extension of the muscles of the steed. 
" He frequently followed the hounds over the Cotswold 
Hills, and was particularly clever with the dry stone walls in 
the neighbourhood of the Seven Springs, the source of the 
Thames, near Cheltenham." 
This is the country described in Lindsay Gordon's " By 
Flood and Field," where Captain Nolan, of Balaclava fame, so 
distinguished himself. 
" I remember the lowering wintry mom 
And the mist on the Cotswold Hills, 
Where I once heard the blast of the huntsman's horn 
Not far from the Seven Rills. 
Jack Esdaile was there, and Hugh St, Clair, 
Bob Chapman and Andrew Kerr, 
And big George Griffiths on Devil-May-Care, 
And Black Tom Oliver." 
Colonel F. B. de Sales La Terri^re wrote : 
" My father and my uncle were both prominent steeplechase 
riders in their young days, and old Billy Archer was a well- 
known professional steeplechase jockey, who had often ridden 
with them. When he took the inn at Prestbury he used to 
