RECOLLECTIONS OF THE LATE SAM CHIFNEY. the stables when he was barely three stone, and after putting a racing saddle on to Kit Karr, Silver, Sober Robin, or Magic, show him by the hour how to sit and hold his reins. Aided by lessons of this nature, and constant practice twice a day in the gallops, Will had already become a very expert horseman; and while he was with the string at exercise, his father and Sam, one on his Heath hack, and the other on a pony, would mark out a 300 yards course under the cover of the fir clump on the Warren Hill, and run twelve or thirteen races in an afternoon. Every phase of finishing was compressed into the lesson. Sam would make the running; and then his father would get to his girths, take a pull, and beat him by a head on the post. These tactics would then be reversed, and Sam taught to get up and win by a head in the last stride, or to wait with his pony and come with a tremendous rush. The rush did not, however, supersede the favouriteslack-rein system, which both the boys practised at with the most inDennis Sam almost lived on pony; and tense perseverance. Fitzpatrick, who died in his forty-second year, from a cold caught in wasting, only six months before Chifney senior, used to look jokingly forward to the days when the father and son would challenge him right and left at the winning chair. "By the Powers, it's not fair any. how," he used to say, as he cantered past them when they were at this game; "Buckle and I will be having Sam and SAM-SON down on us soon. his poor When his growing days were past, Sam was a trifle over five feet six inches, and fully an inch taller than his father, but considerably shorter in the legs and arms than his elder brother, who had nearly an At inch the advantage of him in height. He was a large but still a lightboned man, and at the best of times a very bad waster. eighteen, 7st. 7lbs. was the very lowest weight he could scale, and as he soon walked 9st. 5lbs. in the winter, 8st. 4lbs. became his As may be imagined, the weary weeks nominal lowest weight. before Epsom, Doncaster, and Ascot, when the foolishly low racing scale of that day invariably called upon him to boil two pounds more off his lean frame, were looked forward to with no very pleasurable feelings. Will was so fond of exercise, that he walked by Priam's side nearly the whole way to Epsom, while Sam loved the saddle quite as much because it was not walking, as for its own sake, and used to delay going into physic, and putting on the sweaters, till so near the day, that he invariably Many found himself sadly feverish when the task was done. were the exhortations which Will Chifney used to give to Robinson and Harry Edwards, (whom we can see sitting as of yore, after half his walk, on a corn-bin, enveloped in horse-cloths, with his quaint look and still quainter story, and a cigar in his mouth), to take plenty of exercise in the winter, and to act neither winter nor summer as "that Both of them were large-boned men, who stood in lazy Sam does." ample need of such advice; but with all his exertions, the weeks before the Craven Meeting of 1837 were so cold, that Robinson could only just ride 8st. 7lbs., and Sam gave up his wasting in utter His dislike of wasting despair, about three pounds beyond it. did not, however, interfere with his regular masters; but unless he liked the horse, he did not care to trouble himself for any one else, and by this indifference to his profession, he lost hundreds of mounts. He was, in short, not a little perverse on this point; and when a riding retainer was offered him from a nobleman, who merely wished him to take the best mounts and leave the rest to Conolly, he declined it, and thus missed winning some of the finest prizes of the day. He had, however, gallantly earned his spurs many years before he flung this offer to the winds, and while he felt truly that his fame would not suffer from lack of mounts, he felt still less the necessity of laying by funds against an evil day. The term "Old Screw" unfortunately had no origin in his handling of money. Like his brother, Will was also far too easy and open-handed in these matters, and hence he has now to mourn over upwards of £20,000, which the short memories of losers and borrowers have deprived him of. Sam's constitutional indolence was so great, that he could often be hardly got on to the Heath in the morning to ride important trials, even when a favourite master like Lord Darlington was concerned. Once, for instance, when Memnon was matched for 1000 guineas a side, against Lord Exeter's colt Enamel (whose Two Thousand Guinea victory caused his lordship and Mr. Tattersall to race by proxy into Devonshire, and knock up her owner at midnight to bid for the dam), he had arranged to meet his brother at the Ditch Stables. For two hours did Will wait there with the horses, but no Sam, and he accordingly mounted the winner of the St. Leger himself, and won the trial in a canter. "A pretty fellow you are, to bring me back this way without trying the horses!" was Will's remark, when he met his brother at his own stable-door; and "No! No! that won't do, Will-I know you too well to bring them back without having it out of them," was the dry smiling response. The result of the conference was, that a good stake was put on Memnon, and Will won 650 guineas by his trial mount. As might have been expected in a man of his temperament, Sam was slow to anger, and of few words. He was never happier than when sauntering along, gun in hand, and watching his favourite yellow-andwhite pointer Banker, wriggling his stern down the stubbles; and this silent system was much more to his mind than the "fast and furious" sport of which he and his brother often partook with Mr. Thornhill, among the pheasant preserves of Riddlesworth. He was a great cocker, and delighted in a breed of "Vauxhall Clarke " game fowls, which he kept at his seventy-acre Fidget Farm. This stud-farm was perfect of its kind, and situated about a mile and a quarter from the town, at the extremity of the Bury-hill gallop. It was here that he had a small planting, regularly fenced with wire, and laid out with artificial earths for his pet foxes; and he would sit for hours in summer evening, watching them come out to feed and play. Many a gallant bagman drew his breath in this little nook, and when Lord Darlington visited Newmarket (which he never did in the October meetings), he generally went on there, not so much to look over the young things, as to get a summer wind-scent of the "Charlies," to keep his spirits up till he could again throw his leather horn-belt across his shoulders, and again enter in his diary that the "darling hounds behaved like jewels." If the two Chifneys were not well up with the "jewels" in some of their fastest things across the Bedale country, it was not for lack of having the best mounts that his lordship's stables at Newton House could afford; and they not unfrequently went a on to stay at Raby, and look through the racing stables. Even Sam's phlegmatic nature enjoyed these Yorkshire outings quite as much, in its way, as his brother's more mercurial one; and it is on record that though he had no pretensions to a voice, he would chime in right lustily with the chorus of " With my Ballymonoora-the hounds of old Raby for me," when it was once fairly set a going in his little snuggery. Without any disrespect to the memories of Thomas Goodison and Will Arnull, whose selection from the mass of Northern and Southern jockeys to ride Filho da Puta and Sir Joshua in their great 1816 match is their best epitaph, we may safely aver that such a quartet of brilliant horsemen as Buckle, Chifney, Robinson, and Harry Edwards, never issued side by side from the Ditch stables. Yorkshire was "Old Harry's" great battle-field, where the brilliancy and power of his settings-to and finishes not only conferred no little lustre on the Fitzwilliam, Kelburne, and Houldsworth jackets, but terrified Tommy Lye to that degree, that he confided to a friend, he would "quite as lieve ride against Sattan." The club wits were not wide of the mark when they said of Buckle, in 1823, "For trained to the turf, he still stands quite alone, as a faultless build for horseback, and forty years of incessant practice, these two and Chifney (whom they never loved after his dashing débút at York in 1805), that when they had once won their race, they never gave it away again, as second-raters are apt to do. There was no jealousy whatever between the three, except during the race itself; and in fact, Sam very often begged them as a favour to take some of his best mounts off his hands. For some time after Robinson first came out, he only thought him a moderate rider; but at the close of a Newmarket Meeting, as he rode home from the Heath with his brother, he broke out suddenly, after a long thoughtful pause, with "By-the-bye, Will, have you observed Robinson this week?" "Yes indeed I have," was Will's answer, whose eye never failed to catch in an instant anything brilliant, or the reverse, about man or horse. "Well!" was the slow rejoinder, "he's taken to riding like the very devil." Will did not fail to report to "Our Jim" what Sam had been saying of him, and he at once confessed that he was quite right, and that a more decided style of riding seemed to have flashed on him all at once. Chifney, rather than Buckle, was the model he had adopted, and the names of the two will be for ever linked together in turf memory. In point of judgment and knowledge of pace, there was little to choose between them; but while the one was more powerful, the other was more elegant in his manner of finishing, and did not sit so much back in his set-to. Sam's mode of drawing his horse together, and then bringing it with his unique and tremendous rush of nearly half a length in the last three or four strides, was a picturesque contrast to the exquisitely neat "short head," by which Robinson used to nail his opponents on the post, and send Will Arnull especially growling back to scale. In the one case you saw the whole, and wondered at the fearful concentration of man and horse power with which the deed was done; in the other, you wondered how it could be done so instantaneously that you hardly saw it. The handling of Nutwith for the St. Leger, and Landgrave for the Cambridgeshire, by those exquisite horsemen, Job Marson and Chapple, exactly illustrate the two styles. Nutwith was brought with a desperate and masterly timed rush, just as Cotherstone defeated Prizefighter; and Landgrave was waited with, till the very last stride, with such agonizing patience, that a sporting writer declared that "he could have taken a pistol out, and shot the reins in two." The Chifney rush became so famed, and was so dangerous an experiment in the hands of any one who was not a consummate judge of exactly what was left in a horse, that scores of races have been thrown away by a feeble imitation of it. Frank Butler had many a hint and lesson from his uncles on the subject— with what result the pages of Weatherby can best record. To see Sam and Robinson eyeing each other's horses before a great race or match, and to hear their dry quaint mode of chaffing each other on the point, was no slight treat; and when they were once off, Sam would invariably keep lurching behind so directly in his leader's track, that with all his glances, he could hardly tell on which side the challenge would come, till he found him suddenly at his quarters. No wonder that the Heath rang again when the veterans met for what proved their last match, in the May of '44, and that there should have been such bitter regret that the elder of the twain hung up his whip and saddle after Mr. Thornhill died, and that the younger became disabled from using them, when their nerve and power had scarcely begunto wane. SKETCHES IN SCARLET. BY GREYBEARD. "Nimium ne crede colori." We recollect well how in our younger days we were wont to gaze in open-mouthed admiration at sundry imaginative compositions from the pencil of Alken, purporting to convey the dare-devil manner in which those of the "the right sort" were in the daily habit of riding to hounds, and the ghastly obstacles surmounted by such desperadoes in their frantic career. We have now before our mind's eye the freshcoloured gentleman in the high collar, swallow-tailed coat, and narrowbrimmed hat, clearing a double post-and-rail, as wide as Piccadilly, in the swing of his bay horse, or screwing the chesnut, that he affirms "by the Lord Harry, can almost fly!" through a spinny thick and impervious as the Black Forest, and over a park-paling of some six feet and upwards, with a drop into a turnpike-road. Neither have we forgotten the famous chronicles of Nimrod, immortalizing in alphabetical order "The Hard Riders of England" and their eccentric, not to say ludicrous performances when maddened by the chase. We feel as if we must have personally known and respected that dauntless nobleman who was accustomed to secure the services of the countryman "on t'other side," to catch his horse, after the rattling fall he meditated the perpetration of, in order to arrive there, and shutting our eyes to the obvious delay which must have arisen in driving a bargain so much out of the ploughman's usual line of business, and the greater safety, punctuality, and despatch," which would have been attained by galloping incontinently to the nearest gate, we have worshipped him as a hero, though we must confess we have never set him up as an example. In short, what with high-colouring both of the brush and goose-quill, what with clandestine perusals of Bell's Life, and stolen vignettes from the Sporting Magazine,-above all, what with the after dinner conversation of sundry enthusiasts on whom our boyhood loved to gaze in mute admiration, and whose tales we swallowed with a verdant avidity which must have been unspeakably refreshing to the orators, it is no wonder, that by the time we came to "gills" and a tail-coat, and a horse of our own (not a pony, but an excellent old screw who could go straight on occasion), we had boiled up to fever-heat as regarded hunting, and esteemed the judicious management of a stable of hunters, and the riding them well up to a pack of fox-hounds, as the noblest pursuit, the highest accomplishment of intellectual man. Yes we had not got Alken's "Right Sort" out of our heads, and we burned to be acknowledged as one of that devoted band. Well do we remember our first day really on a hunter. Well do we remember the determination to do or die, with which we settled ourselves in the saddle, and selecting an unconscious pilot, himself no 66 |