There is
always something wanting or forgotten. Either they forget the ropes, or
they forget the scales, or they forget the weights, or they forget the
bell, or--more commonly still--some of the parties forget themselves.
Farmers, too, are easily satisfied with the benefits of an irresponsible
mob careering over their farms, even though some of them are attired in the
miscellaneous garb of hunting and racing costume. Indeed, it is just this
mixture of two sports that spoils both; steeple-chasing being neither
hunting nor racing. It has not the wild excitement of the one, nor the
accurate calculating qualities of the other. The very horses have a
peculiar air about them--neither hunters nor hacks, nor yet exactly
race-horses. Some of them, doubtless, are fine, good-looking,
well-conditioned animals; but the majority are lean, lathy, sunken-eyed,
woe-begone, iron-marked, desperately-abused brutes, lacking all the lively
energy that characterizes the movements of the up-to-the-mark hunter. In
the early days of steeple-chasing a popular fiction existed that the horses
were hunters; and grooms and fellows used to come nicking and grinning up
to masters of hounds at checks and critical times, requesting them to note
that they were out, in order to ask for certificates of the horses having
been 'regularly hunted'--a species of regularity than which nothing could
be more irregular.
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