A YORKSHIREMAN’S LOVE OF A HORSE.

South Canterbury Times, Issue 3789, 29 May 1885, Page 3

A YORKSHIREMAN’S LOVE OF A HORSE.

A blood horse has always been an idol of. Yorkshiremon, who were the first to chronicle his deeds; and attendance on his race course ia an honest, broad-bottomed custom which they will never resign. Before the South Yorkshire line was opened, the Sheffielders, men and boys, thought nothing, year after year, of walking through the night to Doncaster, taking up a good stand next the rails, which they never quilted from 10 to 5, and then walking the 18 miles home again ; and, till within the last 14 years, a Devonshire man used to make a Bt. Leger pilgrimage both ways ,on foot, and accounted for this strange whim on the ground that his “ grandmother was Yorkshire.” In the North and East Hidings the racing taste of the country is more especially apparent. Little oval country courses, doited with white spots, and approached by wide rustic gates, through which generation after generation of country families—who vied with each other in importing the blood, and boasted a perfect bead roll of winners, from Buckhnnter to Caton—have driven proudly in their day, open on you in nooks where you least expect them. A bitted curvetting blood yearling meets you there still ; but a sheeted regiment of raoors with their saddle-bags on their backs, and their tiny grooms at their heads, marching i n Indian file, on their way to a meeting, is a sight which it rare in these railway days. The inns all along the Great North Eosd, where 20 years ago, the poatillion had to aleep spur on bee), when a great division on the 20th of August was at hand, and the ostler

mattered “ horses on" in his dreams are nearly all merged into farmhouses, but racing recollections will hover about them, albeit the bar snuggery has become a cheese room, and Herring’s Bt. Loger winners, which once adorned their walls, are dispersed into all lands. These were the texts on which the jolly landlord discoursed without any bidding to favored groups by the hour, till the mail bugle was heard in the distance, and the guard and the coachman bustled in to deliver the news, and receive “ something hot ” in exchange. “ What’s won ?’’ was invariably the first question from April to November ; and Boniface has invariably remarked to the company, “ 1 told you ■o.” For racing news, and in fact for every other kind, these guards were at that date as good as a telegraph. Only in 1843, a quiet clerical friend remarked to us that ho.could get no rest all night, in one of the Lancashire moils, because the goards would roar out '‘The Cure,’’ in reply to some speaker at nearly every h use they passed. Ho loolud seriously into this mystic word in the morning, and found that a colt of lint name had jus'. won the Champagne Stakes; but even the satisfaction of knowing that 60 miles of querists had been put out of pain did not atone for his night’s rest.—From “ The Post and the Paddock,” by the “ Druid.”