Chapter XIX: The Major’s Stud

MRS. Yammerton carried the day, and the young ladies carried
paper-booted Billy, or rather walked him up to Mrs. Wasperton’s
at Prospect Hill, and showed him the ugly girls, and also the
beautiful view from Eagleton Rocks, over the wide-spreading vale
of Vernerley beyond, which, of course, Billy enjoyed amazingly,
as all young gentlemen do enjoy views under such pleasant
circumstances. Perhaps he might have enjoyed it more, if two out
of three of the dear charmers had been absent, but then things
had not got to that pass, and Mamma would not have thought it
proper—at least, not unless she saw her way to a very decided
preference—which, of course, was then out of the question. Billy
was a great swell, and the “chaws” who met him stared with
astonishment at such an elegant parasol’d exquisite, picking his
way daintily along the dirty, sloppy, rutty lanes. Like all
gentlemen in similar circumstances, he declared his boots
“wouldn’t take in wet.”

Of course, Mamma charged the girls not to be out late, an
injunction that applied as well to precaution against the night
air, as to the importance of getting Billy back by afternoon
stable time, when the Major purposed treating him to a sight of
his stud, and trying to lay the foundation of a sale.

Perhaps our sporting readers would like to take a look into the
Major’s stable before he comes with his victim, Fine Billy. If
so, let them accompany us; meanwhile our lady friends can skip
the chapter if they do not like to read about horses—or here; if
they will step this way, and here comes the Dairymaid, they can
look at the cows: real Durham short-horns, with great milking
powers and most undeniable pedigrees. Ah, we thought they would
tickle your fancy. The cow is to the lady, what the horse is to
the gentleman, or, on the score of usefulness, what hare-hunting
is to fox-hunting—or shooting to hunting. Master may have many
horses pulled backwards out of his stable without exciting half
the commiseration among the fair, that the loss of one nice quiet
milk-giving cushy cow affords. Cows are friendly creatures. They
remember people longer than almost any other animal, dogs not
excepted. Well, here are four of them, Old Lily, Strawberry
Cream, Red Rose, and Toy; the house is clean and sweet, and
smells of milk, and well-made hay, instead of the nasty
brown-coloured snuff-smelling stuff that some people think good
enough for the poor cow.

The Major is proud of his cows, and against the whitewashed wall
he has pasted the description of a perfect one, in order that
people may compare the originals with the portrait. Thus it
runs:—

She’s long in the face, she’s fine in the horn, She’ll quickly get fat without cake or corn; She’s clean in her jaws, and full in her chine, She’s heavy in flank, and wide in her loin; She’s broad in her ribs, and long in her rump, A straight and flat back without ever a hump; She’s wide in her hips, and calm in her eyes, She’s fine in her shoulders, and thin in her thighs; She’s light in her neck, and small in her tail, She’s wide at the breast, and good at the pail. She’s fine in her bone and silky of skin. She’s a grazier’s without, and a butcher’s within.

Now for the stable; this way, through the saddle-room, and mind
the whitening on the walls. Stoop yonr head, for the Major being
low himself, has made the door on the principle of all other
people being low too. There, there you are, you see, in a stable
as neat and clean as a London dealer’s; a Newmarket straw plait,
a sanded floor with a roomy bench against the wall on which the
Major kicks his legs and stutters forth the merits of his steeds.
They are six in number, and before he comes we will just run the
reader through the lot, with the aid of truth for an
accompaniment.

This grey, or rather white one next the wall, White Surrey, as he
calls him, is the old quivering tailed horse he rode on the de
Glancey day, and pulled up to save, from the price-depressing
inconvenience of being beat. He is eighteen years old, the Major
having got him when he was sixteen, in a sort of part purchase,
part swap, part barter deal. He gave young Mr. Meggison of
Spoonbill Park thirteen pounds ten shillings, an old mahogany
Piano-Forte, by Broadwood, six and a half octaves, a Squirrel
Cage, two Sun-blinds, and a very feeble old horse called
Nonpareil, that Tom Rivett the blacksmith declared it would be
like robbing Meggison to put new shoes on to, for him. He is a
game good shaped old horse, but having frequently in the course
of a chequered career, been in that hardest of all hard places,
the hands of young single horse owners, White Surrey has done the
work of three or four horses. He has been fired and blistered,
and blistered and fired, till his legs are as round and as
callous as those of a mahogany dining-table; still it is
wonderful how they support him, and as he has never given the
Major a fall, he rides him as if he thought he never would. His
price is sometimes fifty, sometimes forty, sometimes thirty, and
there are times when he might be bought for a little less—two
sovereigns, perhaps, returned out of the thirty. The next one to
him—the white legged brown,—is of the antediluvian order too. He
is now called Woodpecker, but he may be traced by half-a-dozen
aliases through other stables—Buckhunter, Captain Tart,
Fleacatcher, Sportsman, Marc Anthony, &c. He is nearly, if not
quite thorough bred, and the ignoble purposes to which he has
been subjected, false start making, steeple chasing, flat and
hurdle racing, accounts for the number of his names. The Major
got him from Captain Caret, of the Apple-pie huzzars, when that
gallant regiment was ordered out to India,—taking him all away
together, saddle, bridle, clothing, &c., for twenty-three pounds,
a strong iron-bound chest, fit for sea purposes, as the Major
described it, and a spying glass. This horse, like all the rest
of them, indeed, is variously priced, depending upon the party
asking, sometimes fifty, sometimes five-and-twenty would buy him.

The third is a mare, a black mare, called Star, late the property
of Mr. Hazey, the horse-dealing master of the Squeezington
hounds. Hazey sold her in his usual course of horse-dealing
cheating to young Mr. Sprigginson, of Marygold Lodge, for a
hundred and twenty guineas (the shillings back), Hazey’s
discrimination enabling him to see that she was turning weaver,
and Sprigginson not liking her, returned her on the warranty;
when, of course, Hazey refusing to receive her, she was sent to
the Eclipse Livery and Bait Stables at Hinton, where, after
weaving her head off, she was sold at the hammer to the Major for
twenty-nine pounds. Sprig then brought an action against Hazey
for the balance, bringing half-a-dozen witnesses to prove that
she wove when she came; Hazey, of course, bringing a dozen to
swear that she never did nothin’ ‘o the sort with him, and must
have learnt it on the road; and the jury being perplexed, and one
of them having a cow to calve, another wanting to see his
sweetheart, and the rest wanting their dinners, they just tossed
up for it, “Heads!” for Sprig; “Tails!” for Hazey, and Sprig won.
There she goes, you see, weaving backwards and forwards like a
caged panther in a den. Still she is far from being the worst
that the Major has; indeed, we are not sure that she is not about
the best, only, as Solomon says, with reference to her weaving,
she gets the “langer the warser.”

Number four is a handsome whole coloured bright bay horse,
“Napoleon the Great,” as the Major calls him, in hopes that his
illustrious name will sell him, for of all bad tickets he ever
had, the Major thinks Nap is the worst. At starting, he is all
fire, frisk, and emulation, but before he has gone five miles, he
begins to droop, and in hunting knocks up entirely before he has
crossed half-a-dozen fields. He is a weak, watery, washy
creature, wanting no end of coddling, boiled corn, and linseed
tea. One hears of two days a-week horses, but Napoleon the Great
is a day in two weeks one. The reader will wonder how the Major
came to get such an animal, still more how he came to keep him;
above all, how he ever came to have him twice. The mystery,
however, is explained on the old bartering, huckstering,
half-and-half system. The Major got him first from Tom
Brandysneak, a low public-house-keeping leather-plater, one of
those sporting men, not sportsmen, who talk about supporting the
turf, as if they did it like the noblemen of old, upon principle,
instead of for what they can put into their own pockets; and the
Major gave Sneak an old green dog-cart, a melon frame, sixteen
volumes of the “Racing Calendar,” bound in calf, a ton of
seed-hay, fifty yards of Croggon’s asphalt roofing felt, and
three “golden sovereigns” for him. Nap was then doing duty under
the title of Johnny Raw, his calling being to appear at different
posts whenever the cruel conditions of a race required a certain
number of horses to start in order to secure the added money; but
Johnny enacted that office so often for the benefit of the
“Honourable Society of Confederated Legs,” that the stewards of
races framed their conditions for excluding him; and Johnny’s
occupation being gone, he came to the Major in manner aforesaid.
Being, however, a horse of prepossessing appearance, a good bay,
with four clean black legs, a neat well set-on head, with an
equally neat set-on tail, a flowing mane, and other &c’s, he soon
passed into the possession of young Mr. Tabberton, of Green
Linnet Hill, whose grandmamma had just given him a hundred
guineas wherewith to buy a good horse—a _real_ good one he was to
be—a hundred-guinea-one in fact. Tabberton soon took all the gay
insolence out of Johnny’s tail, and brought him back to the
Major, sadly dilapidated—a sad satire upon his former self.

Meanwhile the Major had filled up his stall with a handsome
rich-coloured brown mare, with a decidedly doubtful fore-leg; and
the Major, all candour and affability, readily agreed to
exchange, on condition of getting five-and-twenty pounds to boot.
The mare presently went down to exercise, confirming the Major’s
opinion of the instability of her leg, and increasing his
confidence in his own judgment. Napoleon the Great, late Johnny
Raw, now reigns in her stead, and very well he looks in the
straw. Indeed, that is his proper place; and as many people only
keep their horses to look at, there is no reason why Napoleon the
Great should remain in the Major’s stables. He certainly won’t if
the Major can help it.

Number five is a vulgar looking little dun-duck-et-y mud-coloured
horse, with long white stockings, and a large white face, called
Bull-dog, that Solomon generally rides. Nobody knows how old he
is, or how many masters he has had, or where he came from, or who
his father was, or whether he had a grandfather, or anything
whatever about him. The Major got him for a mere nothing—nine
pounds—at Joe Seton’s, the runaway Vet’s sale, about five years
ago, and being so desperately ugly and common looking, no one has
ever attempted to deprive the Major of him either in the way of
barter or sale. Still Bully is a capital slave, always ready
either to hunt, or hack, or go in harness, and will pass anything
except a public-house, being familiarly and favourably known at
the doors of every one in the county. Like most horses, he has
his little peculiarity; and his consists of a sort of rheumatic
affection of the hind leg, which causes him to catch it up, and
sends him limping along on three legs, like a lame dog, but still
he never comes down, and the attack soon goes off. Solomon and he
look very like their work together.

The next horse to Bull-dog, and the last in the stable, is
Golden-drop, a soft, mealy chestnut—of all colours the most
objectionable. He is a hot, pulling, hauling, rushing,
rough-actioned animal, that gives a rider two days’ exercise in
one.

The worst of him is, he has the impudence to decline harness; for
though he doesn’t “mill,” as they call it, he yet runs backwards
as fast as forwards, and would crash through a plate-glass
window, a gate, a conservatory, or anything else that happened to
be behind. As a hack he is below mediocrity, for in his walk he
digs his toes into the ground about every tenth step, and either
comes down on his nose, or sets off at score for fear of a
licking, added to which, he shies at every heap of stones and
other available object on the road, whereby he makes a ten miles’
journey into one of twelve. The Major got him of Mr. Brisket, the
butcher, at Hinton, being taken with the way in which his hatless
lad spun him about the ill-paved streets, with the meat-basket on
his arm—the full trot, it may be observed, being the animal’s
pace—but having got him home, the more the Major saw of him the
less he liked him. He had a severe deal for him too, and made two
or three journeys over to Hinton on market-days, and bought a
pennyworth of whipcord of one saddler, a set of spur-leathers of
another, a pot of harness-paste of a third, in order to pump them
about the horse ere he ventured to touch. He also got Mr. Paul
Straddler, the disengaged gentleman of the place, whose greatest
pleasure is to be employed upon a deal, to ferret out all he
could about him, who reported that the horse was perfectly sound,
and a capital feeder, which indeed he is, for he will attack
anything, from a hayband down to a hedge-stake. You see he’s busy
on his bedding now.

Brisket knowing his man, and that the Major killed his own
mutton, and occasionally beef, in the winter, so that there was
no good to be got of him in the meat way, determined to ask a
stiff price, viz., £25 (Brisket having given £14, which the Major
having beat down to £23 commenced on the mercantile line, which
Brisket’s then approaching marriage favoured, and the Major
ultimately gave a four-post mahogany bedstead, with blue damask
furniture, palliasse and mattress to match; a mahogany
toilet-mirror, 23 inches by 28: a hot-water pudding-dish, a
silver-edged cake-basket, a bad barometer, a child’s birch-wood
crib, a chess-board, and £2 10 s. in cash for him, the £2 10 s..
being, as the Major now declares (to himself, of course,) far
more than his real worth. However, there the horse stands; and
though he has been down twice with the Major, and once with the
Humbler, these little fore paws (_faux pas_) as the Major calls
them, have been on the soft, and the knees bear no evidence of
the fact. Such is our friend’s present stud, and such is its
general character.

But stay! We are omitting the horse in this large
family-pew-looking box at the end, whose drawn curtains have
caused us to overlook him. He is another of the Major’s bad
tickets, and one of which he has just become possessed in the
following way:—

Having—in furtherance of his character of a “thorrer sportsman,”
and to preserve the spirit of impartiality so becoming an old
master of “haryers”—gone to Sir Moses Mainchance’s opening day,
as well as to my Lord’s, Sir Moses, as if in appreciation of the
compliment, had offered to give the horse on which his second
whip was blundering among the blind ditches.

The Major jumped at the offer, for the horse looked well with the
whip on him; and, as he accepted, Sir Moses increased the stream
of his generosity by engaging the Major to dine and take him
away. Sir Moses had a distinguished party to meet him, and was
hospitality itself. He plied our Major with champagne, and hock,
and Barsac, and Sauterne, and port, and claret, and compliments,
but never alluded to the horse until about an hour after dinner,
when Mr. Smoothley, the jackal of the hunt, brought him on the
_tapis_.

“Ah!” exclaimed Sir Moses, as if in sudden recollection, “that’s
true! Major, you’re quite welcome to ‘Little-bo-peep,’ (for so he
had christened him, in order to account for his inquisitive
manner of peering). Your _quite_ welcome to ‘Little-bo-peep,’ and
I hope he’ll be useful to you.”

“Thank’e, Sir Moses, thank’e!” bobbed the grateful Major,
thinking what a good chap the baronet was.

“_Not a bit!_” replied Sir Moses, chucking up his chin, just as
if he was in the habit of giving a horse away every other day in
the week. “_Not a bit!_ Keep him as long as you like—all the
season if you please—and send him back when you are done.”

Then, as if in deprecation of any more thanks, he plied the wine
again, and gave the Major and his “harriers” in a speech of great
gammonosity. The Major was divided between mortification at the
reduction of the gift into a loan, and gratification at the
compliment now paid him, but was speedily comforted by the
flattering reception his health, and the stereotyped speech in
which he returned thanks, met at the hands of the company. He
thought he must be very popular. Then, when they were all well
wined, and had gathered round the sparkling fire with their
coffee or their Curaçoa in their hands, Sir Moses button-holed
the Major with a loud familiar, “I’ll tell ye what, Yammerton!
you’re a devilish good feller, and there shall be no obligation
between us—you shall just give me forty puns for
‘Little-bo-peep,’ and that’s making you a present of him for it’s
a hundred less than I gave.”

“‘Ah! that’s the way to do it!” exclaimed Mr. Smoothley, as if
delighted at Sir Moses having dropped upon the right course. “Ah!
_that’s_ the way to do it!” repented he, swinging himself gaily
round on his toe, with a loud snap of his finger and thumb in the
air.

And Sir Moses said it in such a kind, considerate,
matter-of-course sort of way, before company too, and Smoothley
clenched it so neatly, that our wine-flushed Major, acute as he
is, hadn’t presence of mind to say “No.” So he was saddled with
“Little-bo-peep,” who has already lost one eye from cataract,
which is fast going with the other.

But see! Here comes Solomon followed by the Bumbler in fustian,
and the boy from the farm, and we shall soon have the Major and
Billy, so let us step into Bo-peep’s box, and I hear the Major’s
description of his stud.

* * * *

Scarcely have the grooms dispersed the fast-gathering gloom of a
November afternoon, by lighting the mould candles in the
cord-suspended lanterns slung along the ceiling, and began to
hiss at the straw, when the Major entered, with our friend Billy
at his heels. The Bumbler and Chaw then put on extra activity,
and the stable being presently righted, heads were loosened,
water supplied, and the horses excited by Solomon’s well-known
peregrination to the crushed corn-bin. All ears were then
pricked, eyes cast back, and hind-quarters tucked under to
respond gaily to the “come over” of the feeder.

155m

_Original Size_

The late watchful whinnying restlessness is succeeded by gulping,
diving, energetic eating. Our friend having passed his regiment
of horses in silent review, while the hissing was going on, now
exchanges a few confidential words with the stud groom, as if he
left everything to him, and then passes upwards to where he
started from. Solomon having plenty to do elsewhere, presently
retires, followed by his helpers, and the Major and Billy seat
themselves on the bench. After a few puffs and blows of the
cheeks and premonitory jerks of the legs, the Major nods an
approving “nice ‘oss, that,” to Napoleon the Great, standing
opposite, who is the first to look up from his food, being with
it as with his work, always in a desperate hurry to begin, and in
an equally great one to leave off.

“Nice ‘oss, that,” repeats the Major, nodding again.

“Yarse, he looks like a nice ‘orse;” replied Billy, which is
really as much as any man can say under the circumstances.

“That ‘oss should have won the D-d-d-derby in Nobbler’s year,”
observed the Major; “only they d-d-drugged him the night before
starting, and he didn’t get half round the c-c-co-course,” which
was true enough, only it wasn’t owing to any drugging, for he
wasn’t worth the expense.

“That ‘oss should be in Le-le-le-leieestershire,” observed the
Major. “He has all the commandin’ s-s-s-statur requisite to make
large fences look s-s-s-small, and the s-s-s-smoothest, oiliest
action i-ma-ma-maginable.”

“Yarse;” replied Billy, wondering what pleasure there was in
looking at a lot of blankets and hoods upon horses—which was
about all he could see.

“He should be at Me-me-melton,” observed the Major; still harping
on Napoleon—“wasted upon haryers,” added he.

“Yarse,” replied Billy, not caring where he was.

The Major then took a nod at the Weaver, who, as if in aid of her
master’s design, now stood bolt upright, listening, as it were,
instead of reeling from side to side.

“That’s a sw-sw-swe-e-t mare,” observed the Major, wishing he was
rid of her. “I don’t know whether I would rather have her or the
horse (Nap);” which was true enough, though he knew which he
would like to sell Billy.

“You’ll remember the g-g-gray, the whi-white,” continued he;
looking on at the old stager against the wall. “That’s the ‘oss I
rode with the Peer, on the Castle day, and an undeniable g-g-good
one he is;” but knowing that he was not a young man’s
horse—moreover, not wanting to sell him, he returned to Napoleon,
whose praises he again sounded considerably. Billy, however,
having heard enough about him, and wanting to get into the house
to the ladies, drew his attention to Bull-dog, now almost
enveloped in blankets and straw; but the Major, not feeling
inclined to waste any words on him either, replied, “That he was
only a servant’s ‘oss.” He, however, spoke handsomely of
Golden-drop, declaring he was the fastest trotter in England,
perhaps in Europe, perhaps in the world, and would be invaluable
to a D-d-doctor, or any man who wanted to get over the ground.
And then, thinking he had said about enough for a beginning, it
all at once occurred to him that Billy’s feet must be wet, and
though our friend asserted most confidently that they were not,
as all townsmen do assert who walk about the country in thin
soles, the Major persisted in urging him to go in and change,
which Billy at length reluctantly assented to do.